Sort by
Listing Movies
Display Movies
36 Hours to Kill (1936)
Filmmaker(s): Eugene Forde

Duke and Jeanie Benson, an outlaw couple hiding out under assumed names. Duke realizes that he has a winning sweepstake ticket and will win $150,000 if he can cash it in without getting apprehended

Making Your Bed I watched this in preparation for “Europa”. Both are essentially railroad movies. This is about a gangster who has come out of hiding to take a train trip to from Los Angeles to Chicago to collect on a sweepstakes ticket. On the...
Published December 8, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
36 Fillette (1988)
Filmmaker(s): Catherine Breillat

Lili, a pouty and voluptuous 14-year-old, is caravan camping with her family in Biarritz. She's self-aware and holds her own in a café conversation with a concert pianist she meets, but she has a wild streak and she's testing her powers over men, finding that she doesn't always control her moods or actions, and she's impatient with being a virgin. She sets off with her brother to a disco, latching onto an aging playboy who is himself hot and cold to her. She is ambivalent about losing her virginity that night, willing the next, and determined by the third.

Evenings of Cabiria In the late seventies, actress/writer Breillat made a film (“Young Girl”) about the nearly suicidal angst of female sexual discovery/fantasy. It is worth watching for the raw honesty, but it misses being a whole film. Five years later, she wrote a Fellini...
Published December 6, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Tombstone Canyon (1932)
Filmmaker(s): Alan James

A range lawman (Ken Maynard) unmasks a black-cloaked phantom killer (Sheldon Lewis).

Haunted House meets Mystery meets Western I love watching these films from the early thirties. Rarely are they good in the way that I need as a modern viewer. But the story is not the one the movie directly delivers, but the larger story of...
Published December 6, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Ones |
Tagged: , ,
The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes’ Greatest Case (1932)
Filmmaker(s): Graham Cutts

A young woman turns to Holmes for protection when she's menaced by an escaped killer seeking missing treasure. However, when the woman is kidnapped, Holmes and Watson must penetrate the city's criminal underworld to find her.

Displaced Mind and Eye The form — at least as established in the Holmes stories and subsequent early detective fiction, has the reader experience things in the order the detective does. In the best, there is some tension as we know the detective is ahead...
Published December 6, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Threes |
Tagged: , ,
50 First Dates (2004)
Imagine having to win over the girl of your dreams... every friggin' day.
Filmmaker(s): Peter Segal

Henry is a player skilled at seducing women. But when this veterinarian meets Lucy, a girl with a quirky problem when it comes to total recall, he realizes it's possible to fall in love all over again…and again, and again. That's because the delightful Lucy has no short-term memory, so Henry must woo her day after day until he finally sweeps her off her feet.

Drew Draws I’ve come to appreciate this actress. Women can do things in that space between the film and us that male actors just cannot. Blame it on the feminine nature or cultural imperatives, depending on your views. But there is no denying that the...
Published December 5, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
10 Tiny Love Stories (2002)
Sex, love, loss and men
Filmmaker(s): Rodrigo García

Rodrigo Garcia's Ten Tiny Love Stories follows the stories of ten women with very different emotional and psychological experiences across ten scripted monologues.

One Multi-expressed Love Story This has been termed an experiment because it is unusual, but it is more of an adventure into the space of the written word. Garcia is a writer. Writers use words as knives to open spaces to inhabit. With this particular...
Published December 5, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Threes |
Tagged: , ,
13 Going on 30 (2004)
For some, 13 feels like it was just yesterday. For Jenna, it was.
Filmmaker(s): Gary Winick

A girl who's sick of the social strictures of junior high is transformed into a grownup overnight. In this feel-good fairy tale, teenager Jenna wants a boyfriend, and when she's unable to find one, she fantasizes about being a well-adjusted adult. Suddenly, her secret desire becomes a reality, and she is transformed into a 30-year-old, but adulthood, with its own set of male-female challenges, isn't as easy as it looks.

Why Are Formulas Endearing? I just cannot understand why I find this endearing and repellent at the same time. I find it endearing because it sticks to tried and true formulas, and being easily hypnotised cinematically these formulas work on me. I am disturbed at...
Published December 4, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Ones |
Tagged: , ,
The Jazz Singer (1980)
His story will make you cry. His music will make you sing. His triumph will make you cheer.
Filmmaker(s): Richard Fleischer

Jess Robin dreams of a career in popular music, but his father, Cantor Rabinovitch, forbids it, insisting Jess live as a traditional Jew and inherit his position at the synagogue. With the help of friend and professional musician Bubba, Jess gets a chance to go to Los Angeles and have famous singer Keith Lennox record one of his songs. Defying both his father and his wife, Jess leaves New York to pursue his dreams.

No Jazz I like to see remakes, because in many cases you experience two films at once: the film you are watching of course, and the one you recall. Usually that prior one is pretty good. In this case, it IS pretty good, and historically...
Published December 1, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Ones |
Tagged: , ,
42nd Street (1933)
The Greatest Musical hit the Screen Has Ever Known!
Filmmaker(s): Lloyd Bacon

A producer puts on what may be his last Broadway show, and at the last moment a chorus girl has to replace the star.

In and Out I am convinced that you cannot really understand yourself unless you understand (among other influences) the movies out of which you make the movie of your life. And you cannot understand the stuff of movies unless you’ve experienced those that invented the...
Published December 1, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Threes |
Tagged: , ,
Joe Dirt (2001)
He Came. He Cleaned. He Conquered.
Filmmaker(s): Dennie Gordon

Joe Dirt is a janitor with a mullet hairdo, acid-washed jeans and a dream to find the parents that he lost at the Grand Canyon when he was a belligerent, trailer park-raised eight-year-old. Now, blasting Van Halen in his jacked-up economy car, the irrepressibly optimistic Joe hits the road alone in search of his folks.

Breathless Poopball These experiments are very tricky, working with irony to the extreme: making a character so helplessly clueless as to be endearing. Works easier with blond girls, but with things so exaggerated in the general area, most projects go too far. That was the...
Published December 1, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Threes |
Tagged: , ,
preloader image