One year on, a full explanation of what might have happened has emerged.
French Spitoons If you know the aircraft business, you will know that you are far less likely to die from a terrorist attack than choosing to fly on an Airbus instead of a Boeing aircraft. The reason? Fundamentally, the cause is that the...
In the year 2022, overcrowding, pollution, and resource depletion have reduced society’s leaders to finding food for the teeming masses. The answer is Soylent Green.
Empty Calories I remember thinking this was vacuous when it was new. Seeing it now, it seems to have lost even more value. Many films work in spite of bad writing, poor acting and casual production values, but not this one because — I surmise —...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
