Broken Chains been working on the link between cinema and science recently. Yup, it is more interesting than you think. But in the process, I stumbled onto this. You know the story about the reporter who set buildings on fire so that he could be the...
Chelsea is an in-demand call girl whose $2,000 an hour price tag allows her to live in New York's lap of luxury. Besides her beauty and sexual skill, Chelsea offers her clients companionship and conversation, or, as she dubs it, "the girlfriend experience." With her successful business and a devoted, live-in boyfriend, Chelsea thinks she has it made... until a new client rocks her world.
Risks of Borrowed Eyes satisfies because he is fearless in a way that Herzog could never be. Herzog goes toward danger in order to capture experiences, but he relies on cinematic methods and narratives models that are safe. Indeed, he never innovates or experiments here....
A mother lives quietly with her son. One day, a girl is brutally killed, and the boy is charged with the murder. Now, it's his mother's mission to prove him innocent.
Torque Sheer storytellers want to take you somewhere into the soul, but all they have to work with is the externalities, the actions of humans. You don’t have many strategies to work with. A common one is to place the examined soul in the midst...
After taking a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in a hospital and is set to face trial for attempted murder on her eventual release. With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his researchers at Millennium magazine, Salander must prove her innocence. In doing this she plays against powerful enemies and her own past.
Invisible Ink found this trilogy a drudge, getting more tedious in the later chapters. Yes, it is another all-powerful conspiracy story with a dogged detective who triumphs. The only attraction I can see is the border that is straddled here. Our girl is alternately powerful and...
Remake of a 1956 Fritz Lang film in which a novelist's investigation of a dirty district attorney leads to a setup within the courtroom.
Fixing, after the Fact is a project for film students: take this film, a loser, and make a great movie from it. I think I would add new footage about the hidden story here (the hooker), present the thing nonlinearly, shift the narrator and the...
Paul is agonising over his interpretation of 'Uncle Vanya' and, paralysed by anxiety, stumbles upon a solution via a New Yorker article about a high-tech company promising to alleviate suffering by extracting souls. He enlists their services—only to discover that his soul is the shape and size of a chickpea.
Hummus is depressing, because it is not merely bad, it stomps on some very precious ideas. The fault is in trying to be Woody Allen; even he fails most of the time. There is a deep concept here, but it is obscured by the attempt to...
A rich man's daughter is held captive in an abandoned apartment by two former convicts who abducted her and hold her ransom in exchange for her father's money.
Expectations one can know, can they? But we always seek to. This small project explores that notion. It is highly abstract: there are four characters, three of whom we see. There is a literal and disturbing kidnapping, but this connects because the universal analogies are more...
While standing in the doorway of the video shop where he works, Bazil is inadvertently shot in the head. Now homeless and jobless, he is taken in by a troupe of misfits who live in a giant mound of trash. There Bazil begins his quest for revenge against the people who produced the gun that shot him.
A Very Short Engagement Span is so very frustrating. Here we have a genius at cinematic space, a gentle, quirky imagination and the skill to know how to start a story. He has made one of the most essential films I know. But he just...
A doctor hires an escort to seduce her husband, whom she suspects of cheating, though unforeseen events put the family in danger.
The Son about film and how it works is made easier when you have two films that in some way are similar. Here we had an original French film that was really quite effective. It powerfully gave us the inner dance of two conflicting souls...
Julian Marsh is an out of work ladies' man who lands a job directing a bizarre adaptation of Hamlet. After casting his best friend and his ex-girlfriend in the show, Julian finds himself in the middle of a two thousand year old conspiracy that explains the connection between Shakespeare, the Holy Grail and some seriously sexy vampires. It turns out that the play was actually written by a master vampire name Theo Horace and it's up to Julian to recover the Grail in order to reverse the vampire's curse...If only being undead wasn't so much God-damned fun!
Mousetrap, Mice a sucker for folded, reflexive and referential narrative, and especially so when built on Carroll or Shakespeare. So take this comment in that spirit. You will probably find this movie juvenile, but there are some clever things going on. The overall shape is based...