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10 March 2010
Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Punishment Begins [Die Strafe beginnt] (1980)
The story of Franz Biberkof, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a fifteen hour film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder based on the novel by Alfred Döblin. I haven’t seen all of it yet, but I hope writing about each section will not only give me the momentum to finish it, but it’ll give some perspective to what I [...]
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8 March 2010
Mulligans (2008)
Attempting to corner the market on reviews for awful gay movies available via Netflix streaming, Mulligans is but another conquest deserving of the addition of three sub-categories and a new major category. I must admit: the quest is not mine, rather: Eugene’s. And it is he who is on the quest to find a decent, [...]
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5 March 2010
This is It (2009)
My impression of Michael Jackson was of a frail man incapable of basic motor functions that, if touched, would shatter to glass. This is It profoundly disproves that, showing him as a completely engaged performer with his hands in all aspects of the performance. He’s chastising the band for being a beat off, he’s telling [...]
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24 February 2010
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)
It’s been awhile since I read the collection of Wallace’s short stories, but I don’t remember being quite as appalled as I was by the film’s distillation of these short stories. In the book, they’re tempered by other stories and so maybe that’s why they seemed so awful in the movie, but the real destructive [...]
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4 February 2010
The Hurt Locker (2009)
The Hurt Locker is among the best of the Best Picture nominations. It doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Avatar let alone actually be in competition with it. They’re both spectacles, to be sure, but one has a depth of character and human understanding that is awful glossy in the other. [...]
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25 January 2010
Texhnolyze [テクノライズ] – (2003) – Rogue 01 “Stranger”
An anime by Hirotsugu Hamazaki, with characters by Yoshitoshi ABe. I used to watch more anime than I do now, the last two series being the truly funny Abenobashii Magical Shopping Arcade and the really beautiful Heibane-Renmei. There’s something about the characters that Yoshitoshi ABe creates that have really appealed to some inner artistic urge [...]
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22 January 2010
Please Vote For Me (2007)
Please Vote For Me is a relatively unpretentious documentary by Weijun Chen about a school class in China holding a democratic election to appoint a new student to the class monitor position. The film’s narrative structure is of particular interest in how it withholds the notion (or perhaps I missed it) that Luo Lei, one [...]
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12 January 2010
The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2008)
A couple of things strike me: I hadn’t updated my blog in half a year, and I have been working on Bartlett The Bear for over a year now. It started as a short story, but seems to have exploded underneath my feet. Bartlett comes to mind, of course, because of the adorable clay puppets [...]
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10 January 2010
The Dead (1987)
Speaking of The Dead, that’s a pretty apropos post to begin the ‘new year,’ given my continual failure to remain committed to the purpose of this: I consume a lot of media, I like to write, so why not write about the media? Lionsgate finally got around to releasing the DVD, but it appears as [...]
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27 July 2009
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Okay – so more or else an epic failure on the bear story. I’m still writing it, but the regular posting of it made me stop writing until I stopped posting. This is obviously reflective of a host of neuroses that are more or less less interesting than Mad-Libs. And so, in the words of [...]
