Month: August 2003

Film makes it real

August 1, 2003

Pictures of last night’s flash mob are here (mmm, lots of cops), here (mmm, lots of media), and here.

I forgot to mention that the Coop had a bunch of copies of Smart Mobs piled up at one of the registers. Lucky guess on someone’s part.

Carry-On, 2024 - ★★½
December 22, 2024
Scripts that depend on precision planning should be precise. This was not; there’s too much concidence and too many plot holes for my taste. And the car fight would have been fun if it hadn’t been so CGI, which kills plausibility.On the redemptive side, it’s fun having action scenes in the back corridors of an […]
Seven Days in May, 1964 - ★★★★
December 22, 2024
I swear Aaron Sorkin has spent his entire career trying to make this movie. He’s not Rod Serling, though, and he’s sure not as capable a director as Frankenheimer. This is close to as good as it gets for classical liberal spirit.(Seriously, though… President Lyman? Probably the West Wing character’s name is just a coincidence.)This […]
Troll Hunter, 2010 - ★★★½
December 21, 2024
Troll Hunter gets what a lot of found footage movies don’t: it’s about the mystery, not the jump scares. About half an hour in, the puzzle takes shape, and the movie trundles along steadily from there. Not that there aren’t scary bits — Øvredal generates a pretty cool sense of awe in the final confrontation with […]
Naked, 1993 - ★★★★★
December 17, 2024
All that and a bag of chips. I kept marveling at the way Dick Pope captured London as hell; the early driving sequence, which is one of the few times Johnny has to be alone with himself, reminded me of Crash in the way the cold highway implies isolation. Then Johnny throws himself against kindness until […]
Long Live Death, 1971 - ★★★★
December 16, 2024
Fascism and religion will fuck a kid up. It’s a coming of age movie set in difficult circumstances; the fact that it’s autobiographical in origin doesn’t make it go down any easier. The corrosive effects of cruelty are laid bare, and the solarized colors of the fantasy sequences make it really easy to see how […]