Buy it!: Click Here! Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Pages:384 pages Author website: GeorgePelecanos.com The Night Gardener is the best novel of the year. This is what crime fiction is all about, human, dark, with glimpses of hope and real joy and sadness. Pelecanos has risen to the top of the class following the classic … Continue reading
I have always said that I wanted to study martial arts so that I could pick fights at bars. This is the wrong reason to study martial arts. It’s so wrong, in fact, that Jet Li’s new movie is essentially all about that. How do you make a movie about the philosophy behind martial arts, … Continue reading
Saying that Feast is the best film to come out of the Project Greenlight TV show is dim praise indeed… so it’s a good thing that this isn’t the only praise I have for it. Feast is a genuinely fun splatter movie that almost never lets up and definitely never takes itself too seriously. In … Continue reading
During the end credits of Jackass Number Two Bam Margera, who cries a couple of times in this film, says, “I hope there’s no Jackass 3.” I understand where he’s coming from – this movie has upped the ante so much that I think the only way a third can top it is to intentionally … Continue reading
BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!PUBLISHER: HyperionMSRP: $21.95PAGES: 272 I’m not really interested in the meta of Lost. The creators have diversified from the serial television story to include a meta-game called The Lost Experience which seems to fascinate people as much, if not more, than Microsoft’s successful ilovebees promotion for Halo 2. The trouble … Continue reading
New Zealand Jonathan King Someone had to finally force sheep buggery into a horror film, and it makes sense that a Kiwi would be the one to do it. With Black Sheep, Jonathan King has made a film so obviously indebted to Peter Jackson (Dead Alive in particular) that it can be difficult to … Continue reading
UK Christopher Smith In 2004 Christopher Smith’s debut Creep was a TIFF Midnight Madness pick I recommended, albeit with qualifications. For 2006 I’m happy to recommend his second feature, Severance, with no qualifications at all. People are calling it The Office meets Deliverance, which is as good a way as any to get asses … Continue reading
USA Jem Cohen Concert films are next to useless. It’s easy enough to point a camera at a band, wave it around a little, then mince the footage like hamburger. And the kids seem to love it. I don’t. I’ll take the concert flick as a bare substitute for a band I never saw … Continue reading
USA Werner Herzog I’m not going to address Werner Herzog’s new feature as an adaptation of his own documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly. In part because it’s been years since I saw the doc, but more important is that the comparison isn’t what makes this movie good, not is it the point of sale … Continue reading
Australia Dir: Geoffrey Wright In the Shakespeare canon, reinterpretation is like adrenaline. The bard’s plays have endlessly been folded, cut and crumpled into new shapes, deviant forms. So it’s not a shock to see Macbeth transposed onto modern Melbourne, where feudal kingdoms become drug organizations and the Castle Dunsinane a lavish mansion. Ideally, this would … Continue reading