Good. Good in a knuckle-dragging sort of way. Fun. The second installment of this movie series is good fun. Jeffrey Tambor delivers his trademark sniveller, this time in a government suit, it still works. Selma Blair doesn’t need fire to look pissed off. Or hot. But the talking manifold cracked me up. Good stuff.
I finally saw “Birdcage”, Mike Nichol’s remake of “La Cage aux Folles”. That is a bad movie. Okay, maybe the movie isn’t bad, but the script was. It was set bound (a problem faced by many play transcriptions) and told more than showed (another problem typical of movies drawn from plays). There was bad casting, [...]
The Dirty Harry movies have been repackaged as a boxed set. Mark Harris in Slate recapitulates the reaction to the movies. His is a traditional narrative about the movies. I think the traditional narrative about the movies ignores the context in which they were made. Many of the films made in the years after World [...]
60% of the world’s art comes from China. Most of it is reproductions of major works. Dafen is a village surrounded by the thriving metropolis of Shenzhen, and the origin of most of the world’s reproduction oil paintings. In the popular imagination Dafen’s artists produce anonymous works for unknown customers, operating no differently than a [...]
I saw a documentary tonight, “The Other Side of the Mirror”. It is about Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival. It covered the years 1963-65. For those keeping score at home, 1965 was the year that Dylan went ‘electric’. The result of that transition was less than the sum of its parts. I don’t [...]
Lottolab.org is a pretty fun site. R. Beau Lotto is a researcher at the University College London and has created some interesting illusions, among other things. The illusions can be found via a link on the front page. See the website for the version that works.
What do you do on Christmas day when the younglings are with the other parent and you have only one good arm? Join the rest of the cripples at the movies. “Dan In Real Life” is the story of a widower of four years who meets the ideal woman while on a holiday (Thanksgiving?) retreat [...]
What do you do when you are forced into inactivity by shoulder surgery? Watch movies. I did. A stack of them. “Man of the Year” is a collaboration by Barry Levinson and Robin Williams about a Jon Stewart like character who decides to run for President as an independent. This movie required more suspension of [...]
This is what the name of Will Smith’s new movie should be, because it was pretty stupid. Stories are about people, and there was precious little human interaction in this movie. While watching this movie, I wanted to hit the fast forward and get the story going. I remember thinking that it was slower than [...]
SIFF has the Werner Herzog film, “Rescue Dawn“. It stars Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler, a pilot shot down on his first mission in Vietnam. It was a rather conventional movie; I didn’t know that Werner Herzog knew how to make those. I have seen many Werner Herzog films over the years, and he seems [...]