An egocentric bum transforms the lives of a shy New Jersey garbageman and his sister.
We See The Poem is a major talent, a unique, competent voice in a bramble of sameness. The last project I saw was “No Such Thing,” which is one of those that if you don’t actively avoid it, it hits you deep in your soul...
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...
Multi-platinum rap superstars Redman and Method Man star as Jamal and Silas, two regular guys who smoke something magical, ace their college entrance exams and wind up at Harvard. Ivy League ways are strange but Silas and Jamal take it in a stride -- until their supply of supernatural smoke runs dry. That's when they have to start living by their wits and rely on their natural resources to make the grade.
Not Stale 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...
A group of unwitting teens are stranded near a strange wax museum and soon must fight to survive and keep from becoming the next exhibit.
Melted Me good movie may be like anything else: long periods of ordinariness with a few memorable bits. We tend to recall and savour only those memorable bits. For me, that was this movie. Yes, it was ordinary: hokey, stupid, bad acting and such. Yes, the...
A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.
<strong>Pods, Plots and Plodders in a while Hollywood produces a movie that decades later gets adopted by American industrialised secondary education. That’s because teachers confuse various notions of ideas and think that movies are a great teaching tool. So to teach the evils of...
A young programmer whose job is to watch over the reality-warping Cube defies orders to rescue an innocent mother trapped in one of its rooms.
Watchers was one of the enthusiasts of the original. It seemed a clever solution to one of filmdoms most persistent challenges: how to stage drama. Noir is our most basic cinematic model. The core of noir is a universe where capricious fate toys with human destiny...
Disenchanted with the movie industry, Chili Palmer tries the music industry, meeting and romancing a widow of a music executive along the way.
Acting Cool are born into the doom of being actors. If we are lucky we discover who we are but until then we go through a process of acting a role. Some movies play with this idea, and “Get Shorty” was one of the most...
An elderly woman confides to Poirot that she fears one of her relatives is trying to kill her for her money. He persuades her to disinherit her heirs, but she is murdered anyway.
Script Mysteries Watching these Suchet versions of Poirot is a real adventure. Following the tradition set by the BBC, each episode has a different adapter and director. The idea is that it is supposed to keep things fresh. After all, the selling points are the...
Sir Charles Baskerville dies on the moor under mysterious circumstances and rumors abound about a demonic hound. When the American heir arrives to take charge, a family friend calls in Holmes and Watson to get to the heart of the mystery.
The Elusive Core of the Genre you want to understand film, you need to understand the three main narrative types: noir, that genre derived from the musical, and the detective story. While the detective story in film essentially means Agatha Christie, you can’t understand that unless...
Women enter and exit a science fiction author's life over the course of a few years after the author loses the woman he considers his one true love.
Gloved Hand Welles, Tarkovsky and Kurosawa are the three past masters. Greenaway, Medem and Kar-Wai are the three greatest living filmmakers. All three weave incredibly deep and personal stories which bleed into the act of their creating the film. Each create striking images that resonate...
