A torrid affair between two women, a struggling artist and a flame-haired blues singer, upsets a man who has a thing for the girl.
Room in Paris guess I should describe what the filmmaker described as her goals. She wanted to make a noir love story and to ‘abstract‘ it, making it pure, and therefore effective. This isn’t noir as I understand it, but that does not matter in this...
Twenty-something Richard travels to Thailand and finds himself in possession of a strange map. Rumours state that it leads to a solitary beach paradise, a tropical bliss - excited and intrigued, he sets out to find it.
Exotic Adventures me, when a film fails to engage me by itself, I jump up a level, in this case making it a chapter in the movie of the life of Danny Boyle. I like the guy. I like his instincts. He envisions worlds that...
Two mutants, Rogue and Wolverine, come to a private academy for their kind whose resident superhero team, the X-Men, must oppose a terrorist organization with similar powers.
Missed a Chance nice thing about this is the casting of McKellan and Stewart. Despite the latter's adventures with the stupid StarTrek, he is an intelligent actor, as is McKellan. They tower over the amateurs in this film as their characters should. About bad acting,...
After the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, his devious son takes power and demotes Maximus, one of Rome's most capable generals who Marcus preferred. Eventually, Maximus is forced to become a gladiator and battle to the death against other men for the amusement of paying audiences.
The Illusionist and the Ventriloquist things about this film intrigue me: the novel integrated talents of Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. We are creatures who depend on idea fragments in everything we do. Virtually everything is a rehash, sometimes creative but mostly not. When someone or...
In Hong Kong of 1962, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow, a journalist, move into neighbouring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their respective spouses creates an intimate bond between them.
Repetition, Secrets, Space with your typical Hong Kong Kung Fu movie. A normal director will simply film that. But not this guy. What drives kung fu movies is not the bozos doing the fighting, but the masters behind them who use them as surrogates. But then,...
A monumental traffic jam serves as the backdrop for the lives of the inhabitants of a Swedish city.
Cartoonish this is not cartoonish as the term is commonly used to mean simplified or childish. Instead, I mean it as stained glass artists did to imply the evocation of something by merely providing the outline. Such cartoons were considered magical, giving meaning to something not...
Gloria is kidnapped and taken to a theater where she is told that she will have "the most exquisite moment of her life." She shares many sexual and intimate experiences on a stage in front of a small masked audience that grows increasingly aroused as the performance progresses.
Taxi Driver’s Eyes Wide history of film can evade porn. Some of it contains some clever ideas and every once in a while it actually influenced something. That’s the case with this. Schrader has explicitly said that this influenced his “Taxi Driver” in the notion of...
The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.
Burdens the celebration a film has garnered becomes a burden. This is perhaps the most burdened of all the films I know. The Criterion DVD has a French TeeVee program made when the film was released. It features French intellectual celebrities (which is what France...