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Billy’s Balloon (1998)
Filmmaker(s): Don Hertzfeldt

A balloon wraps itself around a young child's hand, bringing him higher and higher, much to the child's delight, but a sinister truth begins to unravel.

Inflated is a replacement comment. The original bothered a diligent reader, so I have made some expansion. Animation is like any film type: artists ally to certain philosophies, perhaps without realising it. In the case of animation, it bumps up against that great American invention, noir....


Published August 27, 2023
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The Bird People in China (1998)
The children of the sky.
Filmmaker(s): Takashi Miike

Wada, a salary man, is enlisted to venture off to China to investigate a potential Jade mine. After his arrival, Wada encounters a violent, yet sentimental, yakuza, who takes the liberty of joining his adventure through China. Led on their long and disastrous journey to the mine by Shen, the three men come across something even more magical and enticing.

Purity, Song, Jade has a pretty solid pattern. He makes films for a distinctly Japanese audience, teasing out some issue or two that seems culturally rooted. This is his context. He shifts it into a magical, cinematic world and imagines scenes as episodes within this...


Published September 11, 2023
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Phantoms (1998)
For centuries they told us the terror would come from above. We've been looking the wrong way.
Filmmaker(s): Joe Chappelle

In the peaceful town of Snowfield, Colorado something evil has wiped out the community. And now, its up to a group of people to stop it, or at least get out of Snowfield alive.

Primeval Roles confluence of forces that were at work, when I saw ‘Lawrence of Arabia‘ I was dumbstruck. The sweep of the desert and its lonely complexities mapped thoroughly with the internal landscape this man revealed. Lonely, sexually obsessed but incompetent, determined to press through...


Published February 9, 2024
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Alice Through the Looking Glass (1998)
Lewis Carroll's Classic Fantasy Tale.
Filmmaker(s): John Henderson

A modern adaptation of the classic children's story 'Alice through the Looking Glass', which continued on from the popular 'Alice in Wonderland' story. This time Alice is played by the mother, who falls asleep while reading the the bedtime story to her daughter. Walking through the Looking Glass, Alice finds herself in Chessland, a magical and fun world. There she meets the Red and White Queens, as well as many other amusing friends on her journey across the chessboard countryside onto become a crowned queen.

Homeopathic Seduction 1871, A deacon logician at Oxford published a sequel to his surprisingly popular children‘s story. In that original, he had dabbled in the mix of logic and mysticism that he thought respectable. Fortunately for him, it was characterized as the sort of nonsense...


Published February 23, 2024
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The Thin Red Line (1998)
Every man fights his own war.
Filmmaker(s): Terrence Malick

The story of a group of men, an Army Rifle company called C-for-Charlie, who change, suffer, and ultimately make essential discoveries about themselves during the fierce World War II battle of Guadalcanal. It follows their journey, from the surprise of an unopposed landing, through the bloody and exhausting battles that follow, to the ultimate departure of those who survived.

Wittgenstein's Red Line of Abstraction met Malick in 68-69 at MIT where I was taking a degree in philosophy. MIT had the decade before gone through a soul-searching re-evaluation of the type of scientist it was producing, and concluded that they could do much better...


Published December 4, 2024
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Good Will Hunting (1997)
Some people can never believe in themselves, until someone believes in them.
Filmmaker(s): Gus Van Sant

When professors discover that an aimless janitor is also a math genius, a therapist helps the young man confront the demons that are holding him back.

Snark Hunting admire films that shoot high and miss. But it really rankles me when a film pretends to shoot high, avoids doing so because of lack of talent, and lies to us in the process. There's great drama in the mere existence of an idiot...


Published May 13, 2022
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Chicago Cab (1997)
Do you dare pay the fare?

A day in the life of a Chicago cab driver is examined as he picks up fares from the good and bad parts of the city and emotionally connects to many of his passengers.

Illegal Shorts filmmaker needs to decide early in the game who is going to capture her. The normal choices are short form or long form, usually cast described as stories about people or ideas with stories. (There’s an in-between choice having to do with situations...


Published November 21, 2022
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Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997)
Filmmaker(s): Errol Morris

Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of four men, each driven to create eccentric worlds from their unique obsessions, all of which involve animals. There’s a lion tamer who shares his theories on the mental processes of wild animals; a topiary gardener who has devoted a lifetime to shaping bears and giraffes out of hedges and trees; a man fascinated with hairless mole rats; and an MIT scientist who has designed complex, autonomous robots that can crawl like bugs.

Architecture Machine small survey of documentary types has brought me to this, and what a celebration! This is complex, meaningful cinema that just happens to be a documentary. It is intelligent, complex, deliberate and deeply thought provoking. I think it communicates something that isn’t quite right,...


Published November 28, 2022
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Henry Fool (1997)
An honest man is always in trouble...
Filmmaker(s): Hal Hartley

An egocentric bum transforms the lives of a shy New Jersey garbageman and his sister.

We See The Poem is a major talent, a unique, competent voice in a bramble of sameness. The last project I saw was “No Such Thing,” which is one of those that if you don’t actively avoid it, it hits you deep in your soul...


Published November 28, 2022
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Home Alone 3 (1997)
There's a new kid on the block.
Filmmaker(s): Raja Gosnell

9-year-old Alex Pruitt is home alone with the chicken pox. Turns out, due to a mix-up among nefarious spies, Alex was given a toy car concealing a top-secret microchip. Now Alex must fend off the spies as they try to break into his house to get it back.

The Fighting Child there a more interesting case study than John Hughes? He invented a new genre and incidentally opened a new strain of cinematic techniques. But writing is like other major enterprises in life. Each hit on the pool ball does three things; it attempts to...


Published December 13, 2022
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