You're viewing all posts tagged with reviews

To the Point

Aguirre: The Wrath of God (★★★★★): Full of madness and the impossible, vain hopes of the human spirit. It is a thing to behold. {Buy just Aguirre, or buy what I have, the Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski: A Film Legacy box set. It’s got Aguirre, Woyzeck, Cobra Verde, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, and My Best Fiend. It’s a great set.}

The Invasion (★★): Sorely lacking anything to distinguish it from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Outbreak. Which is a way of saying, this isn’t any good.

District 9 (★★★★★): Unconventional and exciting. Not what you expect, and everything that’s good about that. {Buy the Blu-ray on Amazon}

Sherlock Holmes (★★): A testament to the unsophistication of generic Hollywood reimaginings of anything classic.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (★★): Aimless and uncertain in tone, the film entertains for a while but tries and fails to shift gears midstream.

Swiss Family Robinson (★★★★): The ultimate adventure film. Disney to a fault, but very entertaining. {Buy it on Amazon}

Big (★★★★): Everyone’s inner child, on screen. Imaginative and funny. {Buy the Blu-ray on Amazon}

Crocodile Dundee (★★★★): Not your average fish-out-of-water story. The Richard character is your average one-dimensional villian (it’s the film’s biggest weakness), but it’s got a real heart. A genuinely fun movie. {Buy it on Amazon}

Inglourious Basterds (★★★): A fun work of caricature and an intelligent study of character and situation, but these qualities do not bring the film above its means to make a greater sum than the whole.

House of Bamboo (★★★★): An interesting crime thriller set in post-war Japan. Beautiful color cinematography, serving the culture and landscape of Japan as much as it does the film. Uneven, and a bit too “studio,” but otherwise an enjoyable film. {Buy it on Amazon}

The Muppets Take Manhattan (★★★): A fun adventure for Muppet fans.

Stroszek (★★★★): Bewildering, but fun, Herzog presents an America that’s no better than anywhere else but pretends to be. {Buy it on Amazon}

“
Synecdoche, New York” is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.

The best films of the decade - Roger Ebert’s Journal - A great list of great films.

I still have not seen Synecdoche, New York, unfortunately. For me, it’s Kaufman’s honesty, his frankness in his work that makes it so powerful and meaningful and admirable. In a time when we are inundated with artifice and illusion, here’s a guy who writes movies about real people and creatively presents those people and their problems to us with alarming immediacy and insight.