Movies

A Muse in Search of a Script

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The two movies at which I’ve had the most fun in the past 15 or so years both came courtesy of Albert Brooks. In each, Brooks played weenie-boy whiners in search of something important: courage (Defending Your Life) or the reason all his relationships with women fail (Mother). In The Muse, the Brooks character isn’t looking for anything nearly so deep; he just wants a good script – something Brooks could have used as well.

Tagged: Albert Brooks, Comedies, Making a Mockery, Reviews
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Movies

The Prison of Cliché

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If two young women characters in a movie decide to take a vacation to an exotic locale before going to their respective colleges, the viewer can be certain one of two things will happen: They’ll have passionate sexual awakenings at the hands of a handsome stranger, or they’ll be unjustly imprisoned in a fucked-up judicial system with seemingly no hope of ever getting out. In the case of Brokedown Palace, we get both.

Tagged: Dramas, Making a Mockery, Reviews
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Movies

Watering Dead Flowers

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Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks is remarkable for many reasons, but its greatest achievement is taking a character capable of extreme violence and sweet tenderness and absolutely nothing in between and making him believable and rich. The feat looks all the more impressive considering the character’s perpetual mask of blank impassivity.

Tagged: Dramas, Fireworks, Foreign-Language Films, Reviews, Takeshi Kitano
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Movies

The Horror of Enigma

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When I was nine or so, I saw a movie on HBO at a neighbor’s house. It was slow, had strange music, dealt with a picnic at some desert locale, and haunted me for years. In college, an English and film professor described the scariest movie he’d ever seen. It sounded awfully familiar. My roommate at the time recalled seeing the same movie as a child in a hotel room in Scotland. So we began a long journey to find a video copy of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Tagged: Horror, Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Reviews, Self-Involvement
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Movies

Vampires and Sacrifice

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Werner Herzog uses all the trappings of the story of Count Drac-oooo-lah in Nosferatu the Vampyre but doesn’t approach it as a tale of terror. Instead, he turns Bram Stoker’s basic plot (and F.W. Murnau’s silent classic) into a contemplative study of sacrifice and tragedy.

Tagged: Blog-a-thons, Foreign-Language Films, Horror, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, Remakes, Reviews, Vampires, Werner Herzog
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Sports

Diamond Scars

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In 1999, the person I’d just started dating commented in an e-mail that every time she read the Stephen King essay about baseball, she knew what it felt like to be one of those little leaguers, even though she (at the time) knew little of baseball and less of little league. I was struck immediately: It’s not how I felt in little league.

Tagged: Baseball, Boston Red Sox, Self-Involvement
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