Glorious Absinthe Prostitution This film is crafted of many common narrative elements: The rich cad versus the poor lad for the girl (with the conceit that love is unavailable to the wealthy ‘unreal’ class) The girl who must renounce her love to save her lover (only to lose her own life) The notion of players… Continue reading Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Tag: f2001
Films released in 2001
Ayurveda – Art of Being (2001)
Cinematic Cosmologies I suppose there are an infinite number of coherent structures that pockets of people have invented to explain the world to themselves. All of these will be of deep sophistication. All will be constrained by the hard wiring in the human mind and what we can handle conceptually. Each will be further constrained… Continue reading Ayurveda – Art of Being (2001)
Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001)
Ordinary Extraordinary Swedes are the most orderly people on the planet. Their sense of propriety is something that this American can only wonder about. That’s why this little film escapes me. The whole point of this is that the six folks who break in are not odd-looking, but quite ordinary and respectable looking. All the… Continue reading Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001)
Amy’s Orgasm (2001)
Caught in the Marketplace How difficult it must be for a young writer/director/actor with energy, some skill and no ideas. So just write about one’s self and use the current “intelligent” template of self-reference. That template has our writer playing a writer. The writer on screen is struggling with the same issues that vex the… Continue reading Amy’s Orgasm (2001)
American Pie (2001)
Jericho, my Butt! A very interesting film given some realities: this is successfully engineered to tap some cultural acupuncture point — and it does so after the first film provided valuable information about what audiences thought funny. The first film was uncentered by design: the idea with such things is to cheaply provide a model… Continue reading American Pie (2001)
Kingdom Come (2001)
The Pulpit It 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 at least attempts to be respectful, working to treat the… Continue reading Kingdom Come (2001)
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2001-2007)
Navel Gazing I have now rewatched several of these, and have refined my appreciation. The usual models for these sorts of projects is to distribute the episodes among different directors and screenwriters, assuming that the continuing characters are what matters. This series is different. The producers kept a firm hand on the way the episodes… Continue reading The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2001-2007)
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001)
The Dancing Expositor, the Fluttering White It must be quite something to know about screenwriting and sit down to a bland sheet of paper. You can start with images, or characters or situations. You have to choose the type of thread and how you trace it, including the key decision about who you are. These… Continue reading Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001)
Joe Dirt (2001)
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 case with “Freddy Got Fingered.” I think this one got… Continue reading Joe Dirt (2001)
How High (2001)
Not Stale These things play a game, a delicate game. The idea is primarily to make fun of stereotypes while at the same time exploiting those. They satisfy the dummy watchers while making fun of them. That’s a long tradition in humour and especially ethnic humour, black humour distinctly derived from self-deprecating Jewish humour. The… Continue reading How High (2001)