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9 June 2010
Er shi si cheng ji [24 City] (2008)
Zhang Ke Jia maps the changing lives of contemporary Chinese and with 24 City, his target is Chengdu in Sichuan province, where factory 420 is being shut down to be converted into state-of-the-art condominiums. Basically, the film is a drama that is masked as a documentary, where we spend time listening to people whose lives [...]
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23 May 2010
Angels & Demons (2009)
Tom Hanks getting a haircut made for a much better movie. Note though, that better does not mean good. The Da Vinci Code was so languid and expository that, really, Angels & Demons could not have been worse, but it could have been better. Is it just Dan Brown’s fault? Think about it – this [...]
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9 May 2010
Les plages d’Agnès [The Beaches of Agnès] (2008)
Les plages d’Agnès is a documentary about French new-wave filmmaker Agnès Varda. I haven’t seen any of her work, but conceptually as a filmmaker crafting her autobiography in film, this is an exquisite portrait that sometimes falls into the realm of hagiography. She sets herself up as an enigma, and the film’s structure reflects the [...]
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10 April 2010
Rescue Me: DNA (2004)
Isn’t it a little too soon to have Tommy’s youngest daughter in a car accident? With all the requisite “walk away Tommy” and dudes holding him back while he rages scenes, this must have been a Sweeps week or something. Nevertheless, the writing righted the ship a little afterwards, since this was used as a [...]
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10 April 2010
Du levande [You, the Living] (2007)
Everyone with Netflix Streaming, you need to give this movie a shot. A pull-quote on the box compares it to Monty Python and Ingmar Bergman, and it’s not far off. It’s simultaneously drab and melancholy and yet what bubbles underneath is an understanding of this existential angst and depression that is nothing but joyous. I [...]
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29 March 2010
Rescue Me: Kansas (2004)
Rescue Me‘s central support system for Tommy Gavin is that of his family, and his wife is drifting away from him, saying he is no longer connected to reality. His children are growing up, etc. The wife wants to move away, to get out of the neighborhood of firefighters, where 9/11 has had a huge [...]
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28 March 2010
Rescue Me: Gay (2004)
Rescue Me‘s theme this week is gayness in all aspects of the firefighters lives. Tommy sees gays everywhere – his cousin’s widow is being a little too intimate with a woman, there’s a “geek” vs. “gay” diatribe about Tommy’s godson, and some hilarious moments with Sean and Mike, the two youngest firefighters in the house, [...]
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27 March 2010
Rescue Me: Guts (2004)
Rescue Me showed up on the queue under the mistaken impression that it was the firefighter show that filmed its headquarters in the Badge Building. Turns out that was a show from 1999 called Third Watch. This, rather, is a post-9/11 acerbic take on firefighters. It isn’t necessarily directly about PTSD, though it’s obvious a [...]
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24 February 2010
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)
It’s been awhile since I read the collection of Wallace’s short stories, but I don’t remember being quite as appalled as I was by the film’s distillation of these short stories. In the book, they’re tempered by other stories and so maybe that’s why they seemed so awful in the movie, but the real destructive [...]
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8 February 2009
Save Me (2007)
This was a surprisingly good movie. Eugene and I have an ongoing journey to find good “gay” movies, and it often results in watching anything on Netflix that has more than an average of three stars in the gay and lesbian category. This unfortunately leads to watching some awful, awful stuff. So imagine the relief [...]