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Batman (1989, Tim Burton)
Constantly problematic and constantly great big screen comic book movie with fantastic direction from Burton, wonderful score (from Danny Elfman), a good (against type) performance from Michael Keaton in the title role, and spell-binding production design. The minuses include leading lady Kim Basinger, who’s often quite bad, some clunky plotting, and a disinterested (albeit not… 📖
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Thunderbolt (1929, Josef von Sternberg)
Thunderbolt has some excellent use of sound. It’s a very early talky and I’m hesitant to say any of its uses were innovative, because the word suggests others picked up on the techniques and developed them. Most of Thunderbolt‘s singular sound designs didn’t show up again in Hollywood cinema for over twenty years. The way… 📖
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Doubt (2008, John Patrick Shanley)
There’s a good movie somewhere in the idea of Doubt (a nun suspects a priest of molesting a child, but it’s 1964 and the patriarchy of the Church isn’t going to listen to her). The film’s full of almost detective moments (and faux-auteur Shanley pulls out some Hitchcock angles after the big reveal), but the… 📖
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Slumdog Millionaire (2008, Danny Boyle)
With Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle hasn’t just finally made his grand romance (something he’s wanted to do since A Life Less Ordinary–this time without the “acting” stylings of Miss Cameron Diaz), or given cinema its first great mainstream romance in nine years, he’s also made the best adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel (even if… 📖
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Diggstown (1992, Michael Ritchie)
I forgot MGM still made movies in the 1990s. The aura of bankruptcy and failure has surrounded Leo for so long… it’s distracting. I remember my Diggstown laserdisc sleeve. It’s been at least ten years since I’ve seen the movie. It’s still a great time and I’m left, as I always was when finishing it,… 📖
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Traitor (2008, Jeffrey Nachmanoff)
Traitor is the Superman IV of terrorism movies. I suppose I need to explain. I think Tom Mankiewicz once told Christopher Reeve you couldn’t have Superman messing around with the real world. Traitor is a Hollywood terrorism movie–in the vein of Telefon, The Assignment, Nighthawks or even The Jackal–except it takes 9/11 into account. The… 📖
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Moonstruck (1987, Norman Jewison)
I’ve seen Moonstruck once before–though I’d forgotten the terrible opening titles–and I think (I repressed the experience) that time I had the same response I just had this time. Moonstruck makes me worried I have brain damage. The first three quarters of the film, roughly until the very good scene between John Mahoney and Olympia… 📖
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JCVD (2008, Mabrouk El Mechri)
JCVD might be the ultimate vanity project. I’m not sure if there’s any intention in Van Damme trying to rehabilitate his image–his fans will be his fans no matter what, something the film touches on–but it’s kind of spectacular in its purity. Van Damme’s a well-known punch line, a leftover from the 1990s, and he… 📖
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Gran Torino (2008, Clint Eastwood)
When Bruce Springsteen did his 9/11 response record, The Rising, he was in an odd position–given the gravity of his intent, he couldn’t misstep. He might get excused for it, but then the record would be (albeit well-meaning) propaganda. It wouldn’t be art. Clint Eastwood’s in a similar situation with Gran Torino. He’s dealing with… 📖
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Postal (2007, Uwe Boll)
I went into Postal expecting Boll to be like Ed Wood. He’s not. He doesn’t have any artful composition, but it’s fine. When he’s mocking American action films of the 1980s, he’s showing just as much skill as any of those directors do… it might have helped if he’d shot Panavision. Boll doesn’t seem to… 📖
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The Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir)
I can’t figure out who Renoir had in mind when he made Grand Illusion. It goes without saying he placed incredible trust in his audience, but his expectations are somewhat beyond anything else I’ve seen. Grand Illusion is a film with events–momentous, important events–but they pass without comment, without any recognition or identification. The events… 📖
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Sam’s Song (1969, Jordan Leondopoulos)
For a while, somewhere in the late second act, Sam’s Song is really good. It has its characters established and it seems like it’s going to take an interesting path getting to its inevitable plot point. The film is mostly about Jennifer Warren, who has a husband (Jarred Mickey) apparently eager to philander; they’re wealthy,… 📖
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Burn After Reading (2008, Joel and Ethan Coen)
The Coens usually write tight scripts. Burn After Reading doesn’t have a particularly tight script. Instead, it’s got a bunch of great performances and funny scenes–astoundingly good dialogue (their use of curse words for humorous effect is noteworthy)–and some great details. But the film isn’t really much of a story. Literally speaking, it’s about what… 📖
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Grievous Bodily Harm (1988, Mark Joffe)
The intrepid reporter genre has almost entirely disappeared. These are the films–around since the 1930s, when newspapers became American cinema’s ideal breeding ground for protagonists (many screenwriters, new to talkies, were former journalists)–where the reporter is investigating a murder or series of murders, ones the police can’t quite seem to solve (the police might even… 📖
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Caddyshack II (1988, Allan Arkush)
Now it makes sense–Rodney Dangerfield was originally going to come back for Caddyshack II, but then fell out over script disputes and Jackie Mason came in, persona in hand, to fill in. I kept wondering who writers Harold Ramis and Peter Torokvei envisioned in the lead role while writing the script. My history with Caddyshack… 📖
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The Magic Flute (2006, Kenneth Branagh)
With the exception of The Tales of Hoffmann, I’m not really familiar with any other efforts to adapt an opera to film. I guess there are those Andrew Lloyd Webber adaptations (right?), but I don’t think of them in the same sense–the artistic one. Branagh’s The Magic Flute has more in common with his Hamlet… 📖
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Australia (2008, Baz Luhrmann)
First, a message from my wife: Hugh Jackman is a hottie boom batty. There, that public service announcement is out of the way. Australia is actually not the worst modern three hour vanity project I’ve seen. Peter Jackson’s King Kong is much worse. Australia, mostly thanks to director Baz Luhrmann’s “Looney Tunes” influenced direction, is… 📖
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Robocop 3 (1993, Fred Dekker)
It’s actually not hard to find nice things to say about Robocop 3. There’re about fifteen nice seconds of Phil Tippett stop-motion, Dekker’s got a neat way of shooting cars to give a sense of realism (his cinematographer, Gary B. Kibbe, did a lot of Carpenter’s films)… umm… wait, I’m sure I can find a… 📖
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The Howling (1981, Joe Dante)
All due respect to Rick Baker, but Rob Bottin’s werewolf transformation in The Howling is superior. The transformation lasts so long it’s no longer shocking, just interesting. It’s so deliberate, it got me wondering what the werewolf would do if he needed to change in a pinch… if he didn’t have three or four minutes… 📖
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Straw Dogs (1971, Sam Peckinpah)
Little known fact: the British Tourist Authority actually funded for Straw Dogs. They were sick of Americans moving over. Obviously not true, but it would explain a lot. Not many films have such singularly evil human beings as those portrayed in Straw Dogs, but then few feature such textured evil human beings either. The film’s… 📖
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Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)
Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm is not any kind of cinematic wonder. Coscarelli is a decent director in terms of composition and his screenplay has some inventive moments. Mostly, the writing credit is due because of his enthusiasm for the content. There’s nothing like seeing adults defer to the wisdom of a teenage boy–and A. Michael Baldwin… 📖
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A Man Who Was Superman (2008, Jeong Yoon-chul)
There’s something rather deceptive about A Man Who Was Superman. It opens as a comedy drama. Reality TV segment producer Jun Ji-hyun’s disillusioned with her job, sick of people, and longing for her absent boyfriend. In short, she’s basically a female version of any late twenties, early thirties male professional in a movie (well, movies… 📖
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The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008, Chris Carter)
I can understand why Chris Carter and company made X-Files: I Want to Believe (though not the title), but I can’t understand why Fox produced it. The film was a significant bomb, even if it didn’t cost very much, and some critics dismissed it as an episode turned into a feature. It’s anything but… instead,… 📖
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The Girl on the Bridge (1999, Patrice Leconte)
Awkward failure about a knife thrower (Daniel Auteuil) and his target (Vanessa Paradis). They meet when he saves her from jumping off a bridge (hence the title) and soon bond. The knife-throwing becomes a metaphor for their “romance,” though Paradis takes various lovers, which drives Auteuil nuts. Charming leads, glorious black and white photography, and… 📖
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Risky Business (1983, Paul Brickman), the director’s cut
Director Brickman’s original cut of the film only changes a couple scenes at the end, but they entirely refocus the impact of the film. Teenager Tom Cruise still runs a brothel with the help of call girl Rebecca De Mornay while his parents are out of town, still gets in trouble with Joe Pantaliano (wonderful… 📖
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Rogue (2007, Greg Mclean)
Rogue isn’t just hard to describe, it is–as I try–impossible. While the box cover (it didn’t get a U.S. theatrical release) certainly identifies it as a giant crocodile movie, it’s a lot more. Starting with that description–the giant crocodile movie–Rogue‘s already unique. It’s the only movie of its type (the larger than previously believed possible… 📖
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Special (2006, Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore)
Michael Rapaport’s kind of floundered through Hollywood for the last fifteen years. It seems like he would have been a great 1970s character actor–twenty years too late, he ended up on a sitcom. Special‘s probably his best performance; he inhabits the role of a lonely schlub who makes fun of himself for still reading comics,… 📖
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Ed Wood (1994, Tim Burton)
Ed Wood is a biopic of the unsung. The “misfits and dope addicts” of impossibly low budget American filmmaking. The film’s epilogue, following up with the characters, puts the film on the same level as all other big Hollywood biopics. Except this one is about someone who really didn’t do anything (and didn’t even get… 📖
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Death Race (2008, Paul W.S. Anderson)
Death Race opens with an almost too classy intro text (reminiscent of Escape from New York, intentionally I’m sure) informing the viewer in 2012, the U.S. economy collapses. Death Race opened in August 2008… is Paul W.S. Anderson now a seer? With all-powerful, insulated corporations and cops beating protesters… it’s the perfect movie for this… 📖
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Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)
Trouble in Paradise features some great filmmaking. Here, Lubitsch runs wild with the passage of time–there’s a great sequence with various clocks marking the minutes, but there’s a lot of carefully orchestrated fades as well. The film opens with an excellent mixed shot–again, careful fading–moving from one side of a hotel to another. It goes… 📖
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Happy-Go-Lucky (2008, Mike Leigh)
I’m not sure how I feel about Panavision Mike Leigh. Dick Pope’s cinematography–and the film’s overall color scheme too–is very vibrant. Happy-Go-Lucky is a peppy, bright, Panavision Mike Leigh film. It’s got a loud–good, but loud–score (from Gary Yershon); the score’s peppy too. There’s a very definite arc to the film, with a predictable ending.… 📖
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Frankenstein (2007, Jed Mercurio)
“a monstrous creation ; especially : a work or agency that ruins its originator” Frankenstein. (2008). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Frankenstein I wish I could use the OED, but it doesn’t seem worth thirty bucks. Especially ruins. Two important words for a Frankenstein adaptation. Jed Mercurio does a future Frankenstein,… 📖
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Let the Right One In (2008, Tomas Alfredson)
I wonder how Let the Right One In would work if it made any sense. There aren’t exactly plot holes so much as nonsensical details. Why a vampire–even if she is stuck as a twelve-year-old–would want to hang out with other twelve year olds is never explained. Her assistant, who drains blood from bodies for… 📖
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Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973, Gilbert Cates)
What is this film and how have I never heard of it. Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams is somewhat indescribable in terms of plot. I mean, it obviously isn’t indescribable–I could list the scenes (there are about fifteen in the film, which means it averages a scene every six minutes and that calculation sounds about right)… 📖
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Ashes of Time (1994, Wong Kar-wai), the redux edition
I never know how to describe Ashes of Time. The first–and probably last–time I tried, I described it as a mix of Magnolia and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As difficult as it is to describe, it’s got to be impossible to advertise–a character-based martial arts film, where fight scenes lack any visceral impact. Wong stylizes… 📖
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Changeling (2008, Clint Eastwood)
During the lousiest parts of Changeling–easily identifiable by Jeffrey Donovan’s increased presence–there should be a disclaimer running across the bottom of the screen: “It doesn’t stay this bad… promise.” Changeling is the worst film Clint Eastwood’s made in years. It’s easily the worst of his serious films–afterwards, I realized his last film before this one… 📖
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Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)
Halloween is a technical masterpiece. It’s absolutely spectacular to watch. Carpenter’s composition is fantastic, but Dean Cundey’s cinematography and the editing–from Tommy Lee Wallace and Charles Bornstein–creates this uneasy, surreal experience. The way Carpenter uses the wind in the film is probably my favorite, since he establishes it early on and keeps it going until… 📖
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Baby It’s You (1983, John Sayles)
Baby It’s You is a John Sayles film I never expected to see… it’s John Sayles for hire. Sayles has had a lucrative career as a ghostwriter of blockbusters (Apollo 13 famously had his name on one poster… but not after the WGA got done). But Baby It’s You is the first of his films… 📖
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Sansho the Bailiff (1954, Mizoguchi Kenji)
Sansho the Bailiff is one of cinema’s most depressing pieces. I don’t think, after about twenty minutes into the film, there’s a single positive moment. Good things happen–occasionally–but they only lead to bad things (or the revelation of bad things). The film opens with an epigraph, establishing the time period and some basics. It also… 📖