Too Gay, or Not Gay Enough? Greg Mottola’s Superbad
The urge to merge with a splurge — story of my life Personally, I think it’s just wonderful if two young men want to hold hands and shout out their[…]
Category: Reviews
Tonight, Invite Jessica
With DVDs coming out faster than we can watch them, there’s a whole range of great stuff to rent or buy tonight if you’ve no other plans, rent or buy[…]
“Eastern” Lives Up to its “Promises” – Mortensen and Mueller-Stahl Knock it out of the Park
I had just about given up on gangster films as a genre. To me, a gangster film is only as interesting as the subculture(s) it reflects, and what can one[…]
Goliath in Repose
There’s a luxury civilian cinema goers have over most critics in formulating opinions on film, namely- the sweet cozy mechanics of memory, which can patch up loose ends in a[…]
Mickey Kaus, He’s a louse
An imperfect rhyme for an imperfect schmuck. Mickey Kaus joins with Bill “Whore told me I had a big penis” O’Reilly in castigating The Bourne Ultimatum as un-American because, among[…]
Superbad: Too gay, or not gay enough?
Personally, I think it’s just wonderful if two young men want to hold hands and shout out their love for each other from the rooftops. I mean, it’s just wonderful[…]
The Invasion – Metaphor for Everything or Nothing
STOP THE PRESSES! The Invasion sends out (gasp) mixed messages! Well, most Hollywood films send out mixed messages, don’t they? Mixed messages are far more the Hollywood rule than the[…]
America Loves its Big Dumb War
I just saw BOURNE ULTIMATUM but I don’t want to write about that. I want to write about the previews. There were about 10 of them. Here’s the ones I[…]
Commies, Commies, Everywhere – Tourneur’s The Fearmakers
Commie on a plane – Oliver Blake and Dana Andrews in The Fearmakers Under the credits of Jacques Tourneur’s The Fearmakers (1958) we see a bearded Dana Andrews being tortured[…]
Ronald Reagan’s Shoot from Hell! Cattle Queen of Montana
Up shit creek without a Pichon Longueville ’47 The recent release of Ronald Reagan’s White House Diaries has produced the usual snickers from the usual suspects — the self-appointed, self-anointed[…]
Historical & Epic · Movies · Reviews
300 Lies? Give Poetics a Chance
What’s Greek history without distortions, inaccuracies, and falsehoods? In the western Aegean, in a narrow pass by the Gulf of Malis, 300 Spartans and their Hellenic allies, led by King[…]
Genres · Horror · Movies · Reviews
Return of the Return of the Repressed: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later
Look familiar? When considering any contemporary zombie film, it is virtually impossible to resist comparison to the work of George A. Romero. Although many directors within the genre attempt to[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Close to Home: The Films of Su Friedrich on DVD
Autobiography sometimes trumps art in these uneven works Su Friedrich is a disciplined and highly skilled filmmaker who teaches school (film and video production at Princeton, to be precise) and[…]
Butterfly Dream: Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
“There’s no overt sexuality to Rawang’s care for Hsiao Kang. It’s a tender act of love, a selfless giving of himself to another.” With I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone[…]
Rat’s Eye for the Straight Guy: Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille
Eat first, talk later? If only! Yep, those fairies at the Magic Kingdom are at it again. They’re tryin’ to talk all us straight-thinkin’ folks from Middle America into respecting[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Space Here We Come: P. J. Harvey’s Please Leave Quietly Redefines the Concert Film DVD
“It flashes before our eyes, and we are not even sure what we have witnessed.” There is an incongruous moment in Please Leave Quietly (2006), the long-awaited concert DVD from[…]
The Panther and the Mouse: A Love Story
“Like the implicit struggle between Salome and Herod, it becomes unclear as to who serves whom.” The Night Porter is an explicit film full of implicators, implications and implicitness. Director[…]
An Infarction to Die For: Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Thirteen
Can a film with George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt be all bad? Yes. Future generations will study Steven Soderbergh’s latest, Ocean’s Thirteen. Not future film scholars, of course,[…]
Stay Well, or Else . . . Michael Moore’s Sicko
“What these Americans have could happen to us. And this is frightening.” Michael Moore’s Sicko begins with clips of what happens to Americans who don’t have health insurance. A man[…]
Blow the Man Down: Aki Kaurismaki’s Lights in the Dusk
“The grafting on of the film’s film noir plot has a reductionist minimalism to it, as if Kaurismaki were sketching an archetype . . .” Aki Kaurismaki offers Lights in the Dusk[…]
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