A Trip to Holy Ground Scott is the current and all time master of the big budget long form film, no question. Most big budget productions are really collections of episodes. Few filmmakers have the control to manage the hoards of creative talent that are...
When her husband keels over from a stroke, Raynelle Slocumb calls the entire clan together to remember their dearly departed. Family tensions reach a comedic boil as the wildly dysfunctional Slocumbs squabble and fight their way to the funeral.
<strong>The Pulpit must be quite a challenge to create films to feed a distinct audience of any kind. You can only go so far with stories about gangstas, earnest kid transcends the ghetto, black dating plots, Eddie Murphy farts, and Denzel “pride” movies. This...
Wittgenstein’s Gaudi Chapel the world relaxed and enjoyed itself between wars. When art was a solitary and experimental endeavour. When Europeans rediscovered the power of nature in sex and in some cases the other way around. When lives really could be deep, and debauched and...
A teacher opens a time capsule that has been dug up at his son's elementary school; in it are some chilling predictions -- some that have already occurred and others that are about to -- that lead him to believe his family plays a role in the events that are about to unfold.
The Cleansing is everything. I saw this in a stressed state, looking for escape. I saw it in a grand old theatre with large, excellently tuned equipment. I saw it not knowing anything at all about it. And I loved it. Yes, I know people do not like...
Nicolas Cage is Charlie Kaufman, a confused L.A. screenwriter overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, sexual frustration, self-loathing, and by the screenwriting ambitions of his freeloading twin brother Donald. While struggling to adapt "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean, Kaufman's life spins from pathetic to bizarre. The lives of Kaufman, Orlean's book, become strangely intertwined as each one's search for passion collides with the others'.
Abject Folding am writing a book about “folding” in film. That’s a term I have coined to describe all the parallel levels that have become part of the film vocabulary, among them self-reference, reflection self-aware irony and timeshifting. I love these films. They are always...
Stuttered Beginnings found this to be offensive in that mild way that occurs so often. Storytellers sometimes have to make decisions that cost the viewer something — the worst kind of cheat because it pushes the pain onto the unwitting. Is it a net good...
Only eight out of 36 boys pass the rigorous training at Seoul Action School. They all have different dreams but all wish to become stuntmen. Despite frequent accidents and injuries, they never give up their dream, and the movie follows their hopeful desperation.
Dorm Room Trifles saw this at the Melbourne International Film Festival. It was fantastic in large part because it was new. I saw it paired with “Theater of War,”, whose idea was that little people enable unhealthy societies. That film presumed that structure in film...
An assassin is shot by her ruthless employer, Bill, and other members of their assassination circle – but she lives to plot her vengeance.
God Gets Cut title of the comment is from the ersatz master who makes a new sword for our avenger. This denotes what is wrong about this film, indeed why Tarantino is to film as Brittany Spears is to music. Martial arts are about generational wisdom,...
During the late 1980s, two detectives in a South Korean province attempt to solve the nation's first series of rape-and-murder cases.
Watchers Excepting Snowpiercer, this filmmaker has a distinct style. He surveys watchers and watching by creating and weaving layers. So far as I know, this is his masterwork. This filmmaker sees differently. He sees people seeing, weaves stories around this to keep us engaged, then simply...
Ousted chef Wong Bing-Yi is determined to help Shen Qing at her restaurant "Four Seas". He trains a young chef, Lung Kin-Yat to compete against Chef Tin, the head chef at "Imperial Palace", for the title of "Top Chef".
Cabbage Soup time ago, I watched a mainstream trifle called “Kung Fu Panda.” The only appeal it had was the idea of discipline in ordinary things. The involvement of food was incidental and comic but it mattered. Food is not easy to film. But it is...
