For some reason, I had rated this movie on IMDB without ever having seen it. I’m not sure why I did that but for some reason I did. Because not only have I never seen it, I had no idea what it was about. MILD SPOILERS
Tag: Movies
Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist (2022, Ryan Duffy, Tony Vainuku)
All I remember of Manti Te’o was that his girlfriend didn’t exist and he was probably involved somehow. Watching this, that makes me sad. I feel so bad for this man, not just for what this other person did to him, but because of what we as a society did to him, for seemingly no …
The Up Documentaries (1964, 1970, 1977, 1984, 1991, 1998, 2005, 2012, 2019)
When I first was trying to figure out how I would sum this up, I said “probably the most ambitious documentary project ever.” I should have said “in English” as this idea was actually not invented by this series. Rather, the Germans beat the British to it by a few years. Due to typical Anglo …
Spiderhead (2022, Joseph Kosinski)
I love George Saunders. I’ve only read one collection and one other story, but I’ve loved everything I’ve read. (This reminds me, I really should read his more recent collections.) But I’ve never read this story. So I can’t comment on how true this movie is to the story. [Editor’s Note: I have since read …
The Crawling Eye aka The Trollenberg Terror (1958, Quentin Lawrence)
This is a pretty lame science fiction horror film with pretty bad effects and fairly cliche performances. However, um, it could have been worse. Um, SPOILERS
Yojimbo (1961, Akira Kurosawa)
I have seen A Fistful of Dollars, the American remake of this film, many times and I’ve seen Last Man Standing, the remake of A Fistful of Dollars, at least once. I’ve meant to see this movie ever since I discovered A Fistful of Dollars but somehow it took over two decades for me to …
Jennifer Lopez: Halftime (2022, Amanda Micheli)
This is an official but rather insightful look at Jennifer Lopez as she tries to put on the Super Bowl Halftime Show while worrying about whether or not she’s going to get nominated for her first Oscar. All at the age of 50.
The Lost City (2022, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee)
This is a pretty funny riff on Romancing the Stone style adventure films. Really, it’s a direct parody of Romancing the Stone and its sequel, in many ways.
Ator the Fighting Eagle [Ator l’invincibile] (1982, Joe D’Amato)
This is a classic terrible ’80s fantasy film, made in Italy but starring America’s Tarzan because, why not?
Killer Fish [L’invasion des piranhas] (1979, Antonio Margheriti)
This is an extremely lame film that attempts to combine the heist film with horror, I think, but which fails to do either even moderately well. SPOILERS
Eternals (2021, Chloe Zao)
Well, we have a winner for the “Worst MCU Movie.” I’m sure you’ve heard that already but apparently I had to see it to believe it.
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021, Jon Watts)
The MCU Spider-Man movies are probably the best overall series within the whole massive thing, though there may be better individual movies. But this is the weakest – and longest (and most self-important) – of the three and, in many ways, reverts back to the usual Marvel crap. There is a difference here, of course, …
White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch (2022, Alison Klayman)
I know very littles of Abercrombie and Fitch. For all I know, my first introduction to them might have been that “Summer Girls” song. More likely it was one of their ads, but I wouldn’t have known it at the time. Anyway, this was all news to be. But, for someone who didn’t know anything …
The Day Time Ended (1979, John ‘Bud’ Cardos)
This is one of those films that I watched courtesy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I can’t really imagine doing it without. I wonder if my rating would drop a point if I had to watch it on my own. It’s one of those terrible films that appears to be just very, very boring.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021, Andy Serkis)
So I liked this substantially more than the first movie and I think it’s for one main reason: Venom is present from the beginning. I don’t remember if there were this many wisecracks in the first film but, if there were, I was already pretty bored when they started. Here it’s clearly a comedy (in …
The Heiress (1949, William Wyler)
Full disclosure: I read Washington Square years ago and hated it. I hated it because of Catherine, the main character, whom I felt was one of the worst characters I’d ever encountered in a novel. So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t realize this was an adaptation of that novel. SPOILERS
War and Peace [Voyna I Mir] (1965, Sergey Bondarchuk)
This is an epic, 7 and a half hour adaptation of War and Peace, sort of on the scale of The Human Condition, but not nearly as long and far more ambitious. Apparently made in response to the Hollywood version, this film (or series of films) mostly realizes the promise of Peak TV decades earlier …
Baby Driver (2017, Edgar Wright)
This is a pretty entertaining car chase film with a love story built into it. But it’s one of those films that fall apart the more you think about it, even though there are some touches that should elevate it to something more.
Il Posto (1961, Ermanno Olmi)
For most of its run, this is a pretty classic Italian neo realist film that demonstrates its neo realist chops and hits most of the marks you would think for such a film. And then there’s the final shot, one of the great ones of the decade, which was almost enough for me to bump …
A Separation [Jodaeiye Nader az Simin] (2011, Asghar Farhadi)
The is an unrelentingly bleak tragedy about the dissolution of a marriage in Iran that leads to a misunderstanding that compounds into a destructive feud between two families. It is well shot, well constructed, and well acted and it was a chore to watch as a result. (I mean that as a compliment.)
No Time to Die (2021, Cary Joji Fukunaga)
I don’t quite no what to do here because I must admit that I have only seen Skyfall and Spectre once each. And I have very little memory of either, except the vague impression that I didn’t like them, and that they were going the way Bond movies always go near the Bond’s run, getting …
Synecdoche, New York (2008, Charlie Kaufman)
I’ve finally gotten around to watching the film that temporarily killed Charlie Kaufman’s career as a director. If you don’t know Charlie kaufman was one of the most acclaimed American screenwriters of his era, and then he made this film. Though it is now regarded by some of one of the best movies of that …
Vince Carter: Legacy (2021, Justin C. Polk)
Vince Carter is not why I’m a basketball fan, that’s Steve Nash. But Vince Carter is why I paid enough attention to basketball to discover Steve Nash. And, of course, I was a pretty impressionable age when Vinsanity was happening. So I have a soft spot for him and for his story. (I am the …
Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)
This film is maddening and all the more maddening given its reputation. I suspect its reputation is earned in part from the Americans who had not seen films like this and decided that this must be some kind of masterpiece. Why did Orson Welles like this movie so much? Had he never seen anything like …
Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles (2020, Laura Gabbert)
This is a weird one. The film mentions Yotam Ottolenghi in its title, and the film focuses on him as its main character, and yet he is not one of the chefs baking cakes for the gala at the centre of the film. Seriously.
Original Cast Album: Company (1970, D.A. Pennebaker)
This brief documentary about the creation of the original cast album for the musical Company is so brief because it was supposed to be a TV pilot. The idea was to have a TV series based around recordings of cast albums. I’m not sure there would have been enough, but it’s kind of a neat …
Nights of Cabiria [Le notti di Cabiria] (1957, Federico Fellini)
Some people say, I prefer the “early, funny” Woody Allen, in preference to his more ambitious and serious films of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Well, I have similar feelings about Fellini; I prefer the “early, realist” Fellini, or what I might less charitably call the “early, good” Fellini. I find Fellini’s later films incomprehensible …
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991, Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, Eleanor Coppola)
Having seen Apocalypse Now many times – including Redux, which I maintain is better – I have finally got around to watching the documentary about the infamous shoot. At this point I have seen hundreds if not thousands of documentaries and most of them were made since this one. And I will say that your …
Blithe Spirit (2020, Edward Hall)
This is a remake of a David Lean movie I’ve never seen that feels like it was remade because of the potential to make it vaguely “feminist.” It’s sporadically funny but suffers from a possibly bad casting decision and the usual incoherence that comes with ghosts.
High and Low aka 天国と地獄 [Tengoku to jigoku] (1963, Akira Kurosawa)
This is a startlingly original kidnapping film, which bucks film conventions of the day – of any day, really. I suspect it might have been a little shocking, both in its form and its somewhat taboo inclusion of heroin addiction as a subplot. MILD SPOILERS