Welcome to the third installment of the movies you missed because they went straight to DVD, but you didn’t know it, and you should be fine with it. This one is a drama. See, the first one Ink was fantasy. Then Jack Brooks was horror. Next week will probably be a comedy. But why plan [...]
Welcome to installment number 2 of the movies you shouldn’t at all feel bad you missed. This week’s straight to DVD feature had a 2.5 million dollar budget and debuted to mixed reviews at the Sitges Film Festival in Barcelona. But, unlike last week’s fare, John Knautz’s Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer at least had a [...]
This review begins the first themed run of reviews in the Sleeper Cell column. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be reviewing a few movies that you should feel no guilt about missing. Ink writer/director Jamin Winans was unable to get any distribution for his movie (despite winning the award for Best International Feature at [...]
When deciding on a movie for this week’s Sleeper Cell, I couldn’t choose between David LaChapelle’s gritty urban documentary of South Central hip hop dancers Rize and David Cronenberg’s 1999 whacked out sci-fi thriller eXistenZ. So I’m cheating by going totally off the board and selecting a live recording of a London dramatic performance! In [...]
“The ball is round. The game is 90 minutes. That’s a fact. Everything else is pure theory.” – Officer Schuster¬† For being a movie all about action and music and imagery and running, Tom Tykwer’s 1998 Lola Rennt (auf Englisch, Run Lola Run, and run she does) is all about words. More specifically, the movie [...]
Released in 1986 to the tune of 1.5 million dollars, Solarbabies is¬†sort of¬†the red-headed stepchild of 1980′s sci-fi/fantasy. The movie was directed by Alan Johnson, but it doesn’t really show. What I mean to say is that if I said this movie was directed by Tom Jackson or William Cordroy, you wouldn’t know the difference. [...]
People dog on indie movies, because all indie movies seem to tell goofy stories about quirkier-than-thou characters who end up getting the girl against overwhelming odds, improbably winning an unexpected gunfight or overcoming their debilitating social awkwardness and all this is presented through faux home-spun soundtracks with tinny guitars and totally unnecessary close-ups against a [...]
If you’ve never heard of Neil Gaiman, don’t worry; you’re not a bad person. Just know the man has been wearing black jeans and black t-shirts for the last 50 years or so, and has been telling some of the world’s greatest stories for most of it. And in the interest of full disclosure, I [...]
A Quick Intro: The Proposition is a perfect movie. There is a museum in Gaithersburg, Maryland that houses the basis for the scientific System Internationale: The NIST Museum. It holds the universal meter (decided upon in 1875) molded in an x-shaped cross section measured to be exactly the distance of one meridian line between Dunkirk, [...]
This is the way the world ends. Not with a whimper but a bang. There’s no right place to begin with Southland Tales. The movie is Richard Kelly’s follow up to his cult hit Donnie Darko. In short … ok. There is no¬†short version. The story is pretty ridiculously complicated. But the plot? We can [...]
When I decided on Real Genius for this week, I swear, I didn’t even need to watch it again for a refresher. We all have a a few movies we’ve spent a quantifiable portion of our lives watching. Mine are Robocop, Walt Disney’s Robin Hood and Real Genius. I saw this most awesome comedy for [...]
“In eighteenth century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here.” So begins the novel Das Parfum by the German author Patrick Suskind. The novel was thought to be an [...]
The first time I laughed til I cried was watching the “Mr. B Natural” short on Mystery Science Theater 3000. And every time since I really think it was at TV shows. Monty Python and the Holy Grail notwithstanding, most of the really good laughs I can remember have been in my home watching an [...]
As is obvious from this picture, and from one viewing of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jim Jarmusch is too cool for school. He’s a walking breathing art-house who doesn’t need to try to make quirky movies – he opens his mouth and talks in close-ups and awkward lighting. Coffee and Cigarettes is [...]
Act II scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth ends with Lord Macbeth and his wife hearing a knocking on the gate of his castle in the middle of the night. They have just murdered King Duncan and are afraid that whoever is at the gate will come in and see that they are not in [...]
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