‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ (movie, 2007)
We are all doomed, all facing annihilation at an hour approaching more rapidly than we would like to admit. In the meantime, we seek to communicate our experiences to our fellow living beings. We want...
View Article‘Neil Young: Heart of Gold’ (movie, 2006)
Neil Young: Heart of Gold is not Jonathan Demme‘s first concert documentary. He made the Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense in 1984 and Swimming to Cambodia, which captured a monologue by Spalding...
View ArticleNetflix recommendation prize overlooks established star ratings
The New York Times has news this morning of a winner in the famous movie recommendations race: Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest: The company’s challenge, begun in October 2006,...
View Article‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ (Woody Allen movie, 2008)
For a long time, I was a huge fan of Woody Allen‘s movies. Sleeper cracked me up as a young teen. Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories were masterpieces. So were Hannah and Her Sisters and...
View Article‘A Man Named Pearl’: Pearl Fryar, topiary and film star
We watched a warm and inspiring movie last night. A Man Named Pearl (trailer above) is a 2006 documentary film by Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson centered on one astonishing yard on the outskirts of...
View ArticleTime traveler caught on Charlie Chaplin film with cell phone?
Okay, I just saw this on the WGN News and it’s pretty freaky. It’s a very short segment associated with Charlie Chaplin‘s 1928 silent film The Circus in which a peculiar old woman is caught on film —...
View Article‘Spring Forward’ (Liev Schreiber, Ned Beatty movie, 1999)
It’s always nice to rent an obscure or “small” movie and have it turn out to be time well spent. This was the case with Spring Forward, a 1999 film by Tom Gilroy starring Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber...
View ArticlePenélope Cruz in ‘Volver’ (2006, director: Pedro Almodóvar)
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain’s most prominent director, is especially known for his films about sisterhood and female solidarity, films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and All About My...
View ArticleRolling Stones movie: ‘Shine a Light’ (2008, Martin Scorsese)
I was bouncing around on the Web yesterday when I saw an ad for yet another Rolling Stones concert movie that’s apparently coming out this Friday in IMAX theaters. Now, I have been a Rolling Stones fan...
View Article‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (Guillermo del Toro movie, 2006)
I had been wanting to watch Pan’s Labyrinth for many months, prepared to love it. I already love The Devil’s Backbone, the 2001 ghost story by Guillermo del Toro, and Pan’s Labyrinth is a kind of...
View Article‘Black Dynamite’: Next big movie buzz?
Amy‘s job puts her in regular contact with a number of software developer-type people who regularly wade in certain offbeat, cultish humor channels. She tells me that, among these plugged-in folks,...
View Article‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007 movie, Javier Bardem)
We have recently endured an insufferable procession of godawful movies. They show up here roughly a year after being added to our Netflix queue, so it’s sometimes hard to remember who to blame for muck...
View Article‘The Darjeeling Limited’ (2007 movie, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson)
There is a style of comedy now in fashion which breaks the long-standing assumption that comedy should be funny. This trend was the subject of a Rolling Stone cover story last September. This new...
View ArticleThe Oscars: Honoring our healing stories
I was catching up my backlog of Internet reading and writing on this morning of the Academy Awards when a message from a Twitter followee caught my attention: I just don’t understand all the Oscars...
View Article‘Searching for Debra Winger’ (movie, 2002)
Searching for Debra Winger is a documentary made by Rosanna Arquette which, according to the Netflix envelope, originally aired on Showtime. The film explores the dilemmas of movie actresses over an...
View Article‘V for Vendetta’ (Natalie Portman movie, 2006)
Never really into graphic novels (or comic books, as they used to be called), I had some initial resistance to this movie about a vigilante in a Guy Fawkes mask in post-American Britain who uses...
View Article‘Idiocracy’ (movie, 2006)
Watch enough TV, eat enough fast food, drive through enough construction, absorb enough cable news, shop in enough malls, wait on hold for enough hours — sit through enough movies — and you can’t help...
View Article‘The Departed’ (2006 movie, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon)
The Departed took the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture of the Year back in February, and it won Martin Scorsese his first Oscar, for Best Achievement in Directing. I love Scorsese’s movies, and I...
View ArticleYoung Che Guevara: ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ (2004 movie)
The Motorcycle Diaries is a 2004 Spanish-language buddy film about two guys from Argentina on a leaky Norton motorcycle taking a road trip through much of South America in 1952. One of the guys is the...
View ArticleBlogging documentary: Chuck Olsen’s ‘Blogumentary’
Jennifer, whom I don’t personally know but who sends me links fairly regularly, emailed me last Tuesday about an item at Google Video. Expecting to find a short clip only a minute or two in length, I...
View Article‘Tsotsi’ (movie, 2005, Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto)
When we first meet him in his bleak Soweto slum, the young gangster nicknamed Tsotsi (“thug”) is little more than a predatory animal. Like a panther, he dispassionately stalks and pounces upon his...
View Article‘An Inconvenient Truth': Al Gore’s global warming, climate change slide show
The day before Earth Day, the movie that created such a stir last year — An Inconvenient Truth — finally made it through our Netflix gauntlet and onto our TV. The film is a documentary about former...
View Article‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ (2005, Tommy Lee Jones)
Maybe once every few years, if you’re lucky, you can rent a completely unheralded movie which turns out to be so startlingly well-made and enjoyable that you watch it two or three times. So it is with...
View Article‘Jesus Camp’ (2006 documentary film)
Jesus Camp is an Oscar-nominated documentary about an evangelical Christian camp for kids in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, and, more broadly, about the political militancy of America’s religious right....
View Article‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ (2005 movie)
Late in November of 2005, Oprah Winfrey was on my TV getting all effusive over Memoirs of a Geisha. To hear Oprah describe it, it was the most moving, most beautifully filmed cinematic masterpiece in...
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