Is there a full-blown Peckinpah revival coming on? Warner Bros just released a very nice four film set of his greatest Westerns, and Tommy Lee Jones recently directed a fairly explicit homage in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Now Dead Man’s Shoes arrives on US shores (fucking finally), and it’s hard not to see … Continue reading
This review contains lots of spoilers.By the end of Poseidon the eponymous cruise ship lies on the bottom of the ocean, and so, I hope, does the reputation of director Wolfgang Petersen. The man made a fantastic movie (mini-series really) 21 years ago – Das Boot – and has been coasting on it ever since. … Continue reading
It’s almost fascinating to watch Art School Confidential slowly start coming apart before it finally crashes and burns. Almost fascinating – it’s actually very disappointing to know that the Dan Clowes and Terry Zwigoff, men behind Ghost World (and individually Dan Pussey and Bad Santa), have stumbled so badly with this one. What sinks Art … Continue reading
This review contains minor, unavoidable spoilers. Los Angeles is a weird place, and if you don’t know that firsthand, the movies are always willing to tell you. Hollywood loves turning out movies about itself and its immediate environs, and it’s rare when one of those are really of interest to anyone outside that community. The … Continue reading
“What’s in Rabbit Foot?” someone asks in Mission: Impossible: 3. The answer, my friends, is pure, concentrated MacGuffin. Like any good MacGuffin, Rabbit Foot is the thing that drives the mechanics of this film – in MI3’s case it’s a device (biohazardous, it seems) that evil arms merchant Philip Seymour Hoffman wants, and he’ll kill … Continue reading
It’s been a while since we did one of these, and you folks have asked for it so here’s a new one. If all goes well I’m going to try and do these for all the big summer releases. Hopefully we’ll also have one tag team review on each podcast starting with the 9th one. … Continue reading
Sitting down before United 93, I expected a difficult experience. I was prepared for a film that would play to my assumptions about the hijacking and its perpetrators. I worried that it would be crass. And the film is sometimes extremely difficult to watch; it would probably be worthless otherwise. But crass and obvious it’s … Continue reading
What if they threw a satire and no jokes came? This is the question American Dreamz answers in its interminable running time. Completely castrated and devoid of comedy, American Dreamz is what it looks like when a filmmaker runs out of nerve just before filming begins. The movie barely even attempts to extend its comedy … Continue reading
Many years ago some friends and I shared rent on a dingy practice space with one of those goth/metal bands that now litter MySpace. You know the ones: homemade backdrop with thorny roses, economy size mascara. They left their lyric book on an amp one day and we had a ball reading it. I don’t … Continue reading
I think Hard Candy is a film perhaps best seen cold – without any knowledge of the storyline whatsoever. If you don’t know anything about the film, stop reading after this paragraph – the rest of this positive review contains the sort of minor spoilers that tell you what a movie is about and that … Continue reading