KNOWING (***) - Dir. Alex Proyas

A shadowy, creepy, and pretty good end-of-the-world thriller, involving the multiplex version of quantum mechanics, the Book of Daniel, a time capsule that predicted all the disasters of the last 50 years, and an unhinged professor (Nicolas Cage) whose son is being stalked.  Who’s stalking him?  Why, creepy pale ( Read more... )

STATE OF PLAY (**1/2) - Dir. Kevin Macdonald

Television sucks because TV shows go on and on and on, pointlessly and repetitively, until they’re canceled.  I don’t have the patience to sit through 65 hours of “BattleStar Galactica” or 80 hours of “The Sopranos.”  Let me know when "24" has been turned into "6."  An unabridged audiobook of all 800 ( Read more... )

SHERLOCK HOLMES (***) - Dir. Guy Ritchie

Finally, a featherweight piece of Hollywood trash that knows better than to scramble its story or its visuals.  The result is a fun confection.  The movie begins with Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr., great) feeling bored because he thinks he understands everything.  Then along comes a villain who ( Read more... )

No movie could live up to the camp “good-bad” build-up of “Snakes on a Plane.”  The movie’s wind-up is pretty bad; not “good-bad,” “so-bad-it’s-funny,” or even offensively bad, but simply the blandest, least interesting way to establish what needs to be established.  There are a few howlers along the way, to be sure, but for the most part, the set- ( Read more... )

With the impending demise of GeoCities Free - which I'm sure will involve fiery explosions, collapsing girders, and men in jumpsuits fleeing with their arms folded over their heads - I've begun to migrate all my movie reviews to LiveJournal.  Some of them are as old as 2002 and fairly lame, with way too much time devoted to plot summary, but ( Read more... )

Speed Racer, The Visitor, Burn After Reading, etc.

Ooops, used up another 30 minutes.

SPEED RACER (**1/2 out of ****)

Almost good.  With its complete lack of pretense, “Speed Racer” is almost better than the “Matrix” movies, in fact.  I liked all the candy-colored noise and insanity and the simplicity of the storytelling.  I like that the end ( Read more... )

Man on Wire, My Winnipeg, etc.

MAN ON WIRE (**1/2 out of ****) and MY WINNIPEG (***1/2 out of ****)

In the 1970s, a French highwire artist named Petitt strung a wire across the Twin Towers and walked it.  He was hailed as a hero afterwards.  “Man on Wire” does a pretty good job, in interviews, of capturing Petitt’s compulsion and willingness ( Read more... )

Now that we’re almost halfway through 2008, I thought I should finally get around to posting my favorite movies of 2007. As always, my favorite movies usually deal with questions of religion and death because that seems to be the only way for me to feel that a movie is dealing with something close to the totality of human experience.

( Read more... )

Click to view

I found the glowing red film-snob spot and shot it three times.  Yes, I saw “Satantango,” the 7.5 hour black-&-white Hungarian movie, in one day at the Fine Arts Museum.  That’s a lot of subtitles.  It doesn’t matter what I thought of it or even if I understood it.  I’ve seen the fucker - and you haven’t.  They gave us a ten-minute bathroom break ( Read more... )