In Palindromes, writer/director Todd Solondz has a wonderfully oddball conceit: Eight actors of widely disparate ages, races, body types, and dispositions – and even one boy – play 13-year-old Aviva Victor over the course of the movie. It’s obviously meant as a jarring, difficult film, but it’s curiously tame, the function of a concept in search of something to say.
Murderball is the perfect movie to show to people who think they don’t like documentaries, because it transcends the genre; above all else, it’s a very good sports movie – compelling, fun, smart, and accessible.
In Dark Water, the 2002 Japanese horror movie that was re-made in the United States in 2005, an anxious, annoying, newly single mother named Yoshimi rents a very wet apartment and encounters a greenish ghost. I thought: Certainly this would have been a much more entertaining film if Yoshimi battled the pink robots instead.
The easy, conventional reading of Lars von Trier’s Dogville casts it as an anti-American screed. Yet that interpretation exists almost completely outside of the movie itself. In other words, many of von Trier’s critics are full of shit.
The core material of Julia Sweeney’s performance movie God Said, “Ha!” is strong enough to nearly overcome the treatment.
Twelve albums (and one stray song) from 2005 that I loved, most of them in the indie-rock vein and all of them a bit off the beaten path.
In A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fervid need to turn everything into fussy, over-processed whimsy is wholly incongruous with its primary subject: war.
March of the Penguins, the surprise summer hit, is often awe-inspiring in its content and stunningly beautiful in its visuals, but it’s also a big fucking cheat.
The ever-divisive Lars von Trier is not known as a storyteller, and that’s the main reason his miniseries The Kingdom – which was released on DVD in November – is so surprising.
A document of my film education and something that I hope will help guide people who are intimidated by the thousands of film books available – from omnibus guides to explorations of single works.
