-
Homer in the Water
Thanks to the syndicated television gods, I finally remember where M. Night Shyamalan “borrowed” the idea for Lady in the Water‘s hero-with-one-muscular-arm. Lady in the Water The Simpsons, Season 17, Episode 361, “Marge’s Son Poisoning” What was that about the film’s “honesty”? (Images courtesy of Yahoo! Movies and The Simpsons Gallery, respectively)
-
Festival Fatigue
One of the year’s busiest weeks comes to a close on Friday with a screening of David Lynch’s new 3-hour DV opus Inland Empire. But before then, I’ve got a bunch of new reviews to offer you, my faithful readers, including ones for this Friday’s three wide releases (highlighted by Scorsese’s pretty good The Departed),…
-
Bad Sunday Habit
For the second straight week, I’ve failed to get a review link post up before Sunday night. Oh well. Here are last week’s newest reviews, including a few big ones from the NYFF (including the awful Little Children and fantastic Woman on the Beach), the animated film that seems to have led this weekend’s box…
-
Sleepless in Stamford
With my regular workload compounded by NYFF press screenings (which began last week), I’m quickly learning to operate on 4-5 hours of sleep. Not, I have to admit, an ideal situation. But hey, if I didn’t sacrifice my mind and body in the name of cinema criticism, how else would I be able to get…
-
Marie Antoinette (2006): B+
To the synth-enhanced post-punk sounds of The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and New Order, Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette reconceptualizes its titular French queen as a child of the ‘80s, positing her as a young, rich, powerful and fabulous material girl more interested in ornate wigs, outrageous diamonds and designer shoes than the tumultuous political…
-
The Black Dahlia (2006): C+
The excessive narrative convolutions of James Ellroy’s 1987 novel The Black Dahlia were compensated for by the hardboiled author’s prose – as brutally concise and muscular as a punch to the face – and its ability to convey fanatically obsessive, out-of-control passions. For his big-screen adaptation, Brian De Palma attempts the same trick via cinematic…
-
I Have Come Here to Chew Bubblegum…
…and redesign my blog. And I’m all out of bubblegum. New threads, custom made for protracted bouts of fisticuffs. Obey.
-
Return of the Round-Up
Even though The Protector is technically a hold-over from last week, I’ve got seven new reviews for this Friday night, including ones for The Rock’s football melodrama, a British wedding industry mockumentary, an upcoming Argentinean noir, and Bobcat Goldthwait’s bestiality-related rom-com. Yet the most interesting criticism-related news of my week was that, on Tuesday afternoon,…
-
Memories of Murder (2005): A-
A policier beset by melancholy and infused with turbulent social-political shadings, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder almost single-handedly resuscitates the moribund serial killer genre. Based on a notorious 1986 South Korean case in which the tortured and mutilated corpses of young women were found strewn throughout the rural countryside, Bong’s superbly wrought film traces two…
-
Shortbus (2006): C+
Humdrum explicit sex, patchy humor and crude melodrama converge in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, a graphic rom-com in which the bedroom dilemmas of alterna-lifestyling New Yorkers serve as reflections of both their deep-seated emotional problems and the city’s general post-9/11, Iraq war-fostered discontent. At the titular outcast-courting club (named after the derogatory designation for the…
