Sort by
Listing Movies
Display Movies
Cars 2 (2011)
Take a trip. See the sights. Save the world.
Filmmaker(s): John Lasseter

Star race car Lightning McQueen and his pal Mater head overseas to compete in the World Grand Prix race. But the road to the championship becomes rocky as Mater gets caught up in an intriguing adventure of his own: international espionage.

Killer TeeVee You can see Pixar being as Disney-fied at the same time Disney gets Pixar-ated. In this case, the experiments in a spatial camera all go away while the cartoon becomes an ordinary 3D production. And there’s too much story. It is a kid‘s movie, so...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Ones |
Tagged: , ,
Psych (2006-2014)

The Adventure of the Speckled Bandwidth I was assaulted by multiple episodes of this on a transatlantic flight, and got sick. It is typical TeeVee fare in the way it reduces possibly complex dynamics of all kinds to billboard simplicity. Abstraction is always the game with theatrical...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Shadows in Paradise (1986)
Filmmaker(s): Aki Kaurismäki

Nikander, a rubbish collector and would-be entrepreneur, finds his plans for success dashed when his business associate dies. One evening, he meets Ilona, a down-on-her-luck cashier, in a local supermarket. Falteringly, a bond begins to develop between them.

Foreground, Hinted Background I am attracted to ambitious films, ones that challenge and that have a lot of powerful layered machinery. It is how I build my life. They are work. Art is work if you intend to collect and use it as fuel. So when you...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Threes |
Tagged: , ,
The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Horror has a face.
Filmmaker(s): Roger Corman

A European prince terrorizes the local peasantry while using his castle as a refuge against the "Red Death" plague that stalks the land.

Reds, Tarot To Roger Corman, this was simply another garish, cheaply made horror film, after the model of his previous Vincent Price successes. But for the rest of us, it tipped the world into a strange world of mystical influence. The script is simple enough, merging...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Dirty Love (2005)
got dumped?
Filmmaker(s): John Asher

The klutzy yet stunning Rebecca Sommers walks in on her hunky boyfriend in bed with another woman. They break up and Rebecca starts to fall apart, but, with the help of her close girlfriends, she begins to date again. Unfortunately, the men she meets all happen to be crazy. John, her dorky guy friend, tries to express his secret love for Rebecca, but she's too busy to notice as she tries to come to terms with her breakup.

Ventriloquism for Dummies What an entertaining movie! I share the critical consensus, that it is poorly made and a failure in all its intended dimensions. But I watch movies a different way, and that allows me to get a lot out of it. In this case, it...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)
The game is afoot.
Filmmaker(s): Guy Ritchie

There is a new criminal mastermind at large (Professor Moriarty) and not only is he Holmes’ intellectual equal, but his capacity for evil and lack of conscience may give him an advantage over the detective.

Intermediaries This is a new genre, I think. You go to it not so much for what it is, but what it points to, and what filters have been applied. Perhaps the genre was cemented with the Depp Pirate movies which had noise and story, but...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Threes |
Tagged: , ,
Red State (2011)
Fear God.
Filmmaker(s): Kevin Smith

Set in Middle America, a group of teens receive an online invitation for sex, though they soon encounter Christian fundamentalists with a much more sinister agenda.

State Shifting Suppose you are a filmmaker with one skill only. You know it; you have milked it as much as you can and want to grow. Kevin Smith has one talent only: to create and effectively present a world that is a bit different. The difference...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Gamer (2009)
In the near future, you don't live to play... you'll play to live.

Mind-control technology has taken society by a storm, a multiplayer on-line game called "Slayers" allows players to control human prisoners in mass-scale. Simon controls Kable, the online champion of the game. Kable's ultimate challenge becomes regaining his identity and independence by defeating the game's mastermind.

Controlled Iris The story is that insipid kind made fun of even by Robert Rodriguez. The characters are not worthy of the concept. But never mind that. What interests me in these projects is how the cinematic vocabulary is pushed, and how we adapt our ways of...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
The invasion we always feared. An enemy we never expected.
Filmmaker(s): Michael Bay

The Autobots continue to work for NEST, now no longer in secret. But after discovering a strange artifact during a mission in Chernobyl, it becomes apparent to Optimus Prime that the United States government has been less than forthright with them.

Panopticon Defects Sometimes you simply get proved wrong. I was wrong and I admit it. When I saw the first Transformers movie, I thought I was seeing something that advanced the cinematic vocabulary. The movie was still otherwise worthless, and the advance was in the service of...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Ones |
Tagged: , ,
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
No plan. No backup. No choice.
Filmmaker(s): Brad Bird

Ethan Hunt and his team are racing against time to track down a dangerous terrorist named Hendricks, who has gained access to Russian nuclear launch codes and is planning a strike on the United States. An attempt to stop him ends in an explosion causing severe destruction to the Kremlin and the IMF to be implicated in the bombing, forcing the President to disavow them. No longer being aided by the government, Ethan and his team chase Hendricks around the globe, although they might still be too late to stop a disaster.

The Unused Helo I saw this close to seeing the third Transformer movie, and the lessons are clear. That other film was unconstrained, had no coherence other than the external reference to the world order established by the toy manufacturer. This film in contrast is shaped, pruned...


Published February 9, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
preloader image