This page exists primarily to let me record my progress through various lists of great films, as well as whatever inane notes I might want to make on the films themselves. Its utility to anyone other than me is extremely dubious.
Every seven years, the world's best assassins participate in a tournament to the death. Or maybe the world's stupidest assassins; it seems like a risky way to earn a few bucks.
Either way, it's a great setup for an ultra-violent brawl, and could've been a riot -- if director Scott Mann had gone the way of Crank and kept tongue firmly in cheek. Unfortunately, it's all terribly serious, even when it's being retarded.
Alcoholic country singer Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) turns his life around after meeting single mother Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her son. Somewhat interesting on its own merits, setting aside its problems with characterisation, specifically of Jean, where Crazy Heart really suffers is by comparison to The Wrestler.
It's the same sort of "has-been star with personal trauma" story, but inferior in absolutely every respect.
Victor Salva's creepy story of teens pursued by an immortal, cannibalistic bat-like man is doubly creepy in light of his conviction for child molestation: an unstoppable child-hunter, really?
Of course it works best when the creature is still a shadowy figure in a duster and beaten-up van, but Salva deserves a lot of credit for maintaining the mood even once we start seeing bat wings and stupid hair -- it's a genuinely good start to a new creature-feature franchise.
Great performance from Ryan Gosling as a "functioning addict" schoolteacher.
Engagingly gritty crime thriller following a mainland assassin hired for an intervention in a Mongkok gang war. Worth a look.
Tragically inferior sequel abandons the comedy (aside from a few great sequences), and even cuts down on the fights. Not much is left.
Marvelous martial arts farce featuring Fong Sai-yuk (Jet Li), his affectionate mother, and the women they inadvertently seduce. The serious side -- villainous Manchus hunting the leader of the Red Flower Society -- occasionally intrudes, but in general it's a stunningly funny mishmash of cross-dressing comedy and some of the most amazing fight scenes in film. Forget fighting atop the bamboo; try doing it on the heads of people in the crowd.
Fausta (Magaly Solier), a Peruvian peasant girl, suffers from "The Milk of Sorrow", a rare condition caused by the rape or abuse of a breastfeeding mother.
As names of fictional diseases go, the English title is definitely more poetic than "The Frightened Tit", but of course it's allegorical: the true symptom, result of growing up with stories of the bad old days and warnings of what happens to girls alone, is terror. Terror of men, terror of walking without company, terror of the unfamiliar. Fausta's most pressing medical condition is a self-inflicted measure against rape; she keeps a potato in her vagina, periodically trimming its shoots.
It is not a comfortable film.
It's an interesting look at Peruvian cultural practices -- Fausta's mother's funeral, her cousin's wedding -- and at conditions in the country, but ultimately falls a bit flat. Fausta's character arc is silent and largely inscrutable -- it's rather unsatisfying.
Enjoyable Preston Sturges comedy about the unintentional consequences of generosity: a wealthy financier (Edward Arnold) throws his wife's latest fur coat from the roof of their house, then insists that the young woman it lands on (Jean Arthur) keep it.
There's a popular idea that the best place to hide out in case of a zombie outbreak is a big-box supermarket like Walmart -- all the supplies you need, including hardware for adding to the not-inconsiderable fortifications.
Charlie Brooker's Dead Set seems likely to have been inspired by the site of ravening fans crowding the gated compound of a Big Brother house: in the case of an outbreak, how would the housemates fare?
Hilarious, well-shot -- a horror-comedy shot in the shaky documentary style of Rec -- and with surprisingly good performances, it might be my favourite zombie movie ever. And it isn't even a movie.
Excruciating but powerful portrait of mental illness and family conflict as Kay (Karen Colston) tries to deal with the reappearance of her sister Dawn (Geneviève Lemon), "Sweetie", a child in obese, middle-aged clothing.
It's probably a film that rewards close viewing -- iMDB commentators have intriguing theories about subtle hints at sexual abuse -- but it's painful enough to sit through once.
Ebert makes much of the intrusive camera, which I had just taken as a consequence of Jane Campion, a young filmmaker, not yet developed her deft elegance. But maybe it's just that this is a messy story about messy people, and it has to look as hyperreal as it is.
Prison movies are a rough bunch. "It's not as bleak as I expected; no-one gets raped."
Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) goes to prison, an illiterate French youth of indeterminate ethnicity -- the Corsicans who run the place like old-school mafiosi call him "Arab"; the growing muslim population in the opposite cell block take him for Corsican. He gradually builds influence within and without the prison, first as unwilling slave to Luciani (Niels Arestrup), leader of the Corsicans, and later as a bridge between factions.
It's a story of a corrupting rise to power, troublingly linked to systemic corruption within the prison; power here corrupts not only its holders, but also those subject to its capricious whim.
Snake Plissken returns in the sequel to 1981's Escape from New York, with an aging Kurt Russell playing, straight-faced, an absurd action hero parody. (At one point he chases down a car by surfing a tsunami.)
Unfortunately, it's too retarded to enjoy as an action flick and not funny enough to laugh with -- and it's always a little uncomfortable seeing a movie that you can only laugh at.
Impressive, if slow, Argentine crime thriller, hampered by an unconvincing romance arc.
Mediocre conspiracy thriller slash portrait of a father on the edge. If you want the kind of violence advertised in the trailer, watch Taken; if you want a decent conspiracy there's an even wider field. This one is entirely disposable.
As reductive labels go, "the Romanian abortion movie" isn't the worst. That's the skeleton of the film: Otilia (Laura Vasiliu) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) visit an underground abortionist in communist Romania. The rest -- love, loyalty, a society where life is both cheap and expensive -- is harder to pigeonhole. But whatever it is, it's sublime.
Hapless clerk Dae-ho (Song Kang-ho, Thirst) takes up pro-wrestling in his spare time, with mildly amusing consequences. Not really a laugh-out-loud comedy, despite what some reviews suggest.
Apparently the entire first season was supposed to be covered in the very first episode; only in season two was Joss given license to pursue the story he had wanted the whole time. It's certainly much more interesting than the first season, but compressing a five year plan into a dozen episodes does leave a lot to be desired.
Responses are tainted by expectations: some films disappoint because I expect too much; others seem better, perhaps, because my expectations are low.
From that perspective, the most wonderful thing about seeing Caché for the first time, expectations high after finding it on many critics' lists as "the best of the decade", it was still a masterpiece -- a mystery, a meticulous, slow-burn exposé of one man's long-buried guilt, a lesson in close observation. Magic.
The conclusion of Kinji Fukusaku's yakuza epic (Battles Without Honour and Humanity, Deadly Fight in Hiroshima, Proxy War, Police Tactics, Final Episode) wraps up Hirono's career and sees, for a time, the end of the war. But, of course, a new generation has appeared to continue the fight...
I wish I could say that the series was a Japanese The Wire, a multi-faceted exposé of institutional corruption and the cultural underpinnings of organized crime, but it's more like Underbelly: violence and revenge and violence, a chronology of deaths.
Interesting; hardly great.
John Hillcoat (The Proposition) adapts Cormac McCarthy's novel about a man and his son travelling in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with predictably bleak results. It's a little like a hypothetical 28 Years Later: there are no more cans of food stacked in abandoned supermarkets, no more fuel, no more trees; if there were zombies, even they would have starved.
There's not really much to the film: intrusive score, intrusive voiceovers, cloudy motivations and a conclusion that feels inexplicably like a cop-out. But it's a tense, surprisingly engaging and surprisingly personal look at the apocalypse.
Our world is so large, so connected, that what hits so hard in The Road is that it's so small. If you were the last man on Earth, how would you know? Would it matter?
The fourth in Kinji Fukusaku's history of postwar Yakuza sees the conflict started in Proxy War escalate into open war; the public, agitated by bombings and street-corner shootings, force a police response.
The high number of suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco sounds like an interesting idea for a documentary.
After going bungy jumping off Macau Tower last month I've developed a healthy respect for the level of conviction required to kill yourself this way: it's quite hard enough even when you know it's safe. Unsurprisingly, the most interesting moments are the interviews with almost-jumpers and one amazing survivor, who decided after jumping that he wanted to live and was miraculously saved from drowning by a seal.
What's unfortunate is that the greater part of the documentary is devoted to family and friends discussing particular cases -- and, of course, how bad they feel about it all (me me me!) -- while soft piano music plays hauntingly in the background. It's almost enough to make me commit suicide.
Very weak black comedy (a writer has trouble hiding his blackmailer's corpse) with lovely animation over the credits.
I didn't think much of Cory McAbee's last film, The American Astronaut, for all that it was certainly a standout example of the space-cowboy science fiction Western musical genre.
Stringray Sam is more of the same, but better: though it's been exhibited as a feature film, it's really six separate 10-minute episodes. The format keeps things short and to the point; each episode has a little narration (with marvelous voice-overs by David Hyde Pierce), a little action, and a song by McAbee's band, the Billy Nayer Show.
The music and the wonderfully twisted backstory (Fredward!) are what make it -- the acting is not wonderful and the production clearly cheap. But it's tremendous fun and highly recommended. It belongs on the shelf next to Dr. Horrible.
Hilariously cynical until the mood is punctured by an (expected) sentimentality, it's a bit like Reitman's earlier film Thank You For Smoking: unconvential and surprisingly subtle, if emotionally limited. Well worth seeing.
Interesting take from Metafilter's Pastabagel:
Avatar strips bare the archetype that all these other films are built around. More precisely it strips away all the equivocation and ambiguity of context and bias that any discussion of analysis of those films is plagued of. All of these other films, like Pocahontas, DWW, or even the Iraq War, are clouded by their historical context. We are the product of the trouncing of the natives. The food we eat comes from land stolen or cheated from the Native Americans. We are the people who killed the natives sitting on the shit we wanted. So all of the earlier films of this archetype we're subject to the criticism that, while what was done back then was bad, the product of it, us, is good. Therefore, the criticism goes, those films are biased because they don't present the good that came out of it. [...]
What Cameron has done in Avatar is constructed a story in which none of that equivocation is possible.
Sam Oliver (Bret Harrison) learns that his parents sold his soul the Devil and he now has an unwanted second job: by day, flunky at the Work Bench hardware store; by night, Reaper, returning escaped souls to Hell.
I can't fathom the positive reviews for what is basically an uninspired slacker comedy; things pick up as the plot-twists become increasingly outlandish (the three heroes move in next to a pair of gay demons; Sock dates a succubus, etc.) but it's only ever a little better than average.
Meh.