| Movie | Rating | Review | Date | Your Rating | Match | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Fourth Kind - PG-13 | Could have been an interesting film, but sunk by awful performances and piss-poor direction. Aspires to be a kind of big screen Unsolved Mysteries--the problem being that Unsolved Mysteries was actually a good show, and its UFO segments were not weighed down with bloated padding and awful MTV editing. | November 29, 2009 | N/A | |||
| The Boondock Saints - R | No. NO. NOOOOOOOOOOO. | November 28, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Gomorrah (Gomorra) - Unrated | November 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Angels & Demons - PG-13 | November 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Trick 'r Treat - R | Easily one of--if not THE--best horror anthology film to | November 8, 2009 | N/A | |||
| The Big Lebowski - R | November 4, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) (Broken Hugs) - R |
Tragedy has struck: Almodovar's peerless winning streak has ended. Broken Embraces is a mess of a film. It plays like a series of sketches--some brilliant, others seriously miscalculated--that never fully congeal into a film that works. When Almodovar centers his scenes around his muse, Penelope Cruz, the old magic the director is famous for sparks to life. When she disappears, often for long stretches of screentime, the film flounders. Too many characters, and too little development amid all the overcooked telenovelas melodrama to make us care about their dramatic revelations. A major disappointment from one of the best filmmakers working today. |
November 4, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Sukai Kurora (The Sky Crawlers) - Unrated | Oshii's best film since AVALON, and a triumphant return to his brilliant style of solemn, philosophical filmmaking. | November 4, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Antichrist - Unrated |
Oh, Lars. ANTICHRIST is a film with a lot of fascinating ideas rolling around in its fucked-up head, but none of them really coalesce into something satisfyingly concrete--which is probably von Trier's intention, but unfortunately lends the film an air of "if only...." The first half is curiously dull, and one finds themselves waiting for the film to spring to life. When it finally does, it never quite manages to attain the level of despairing horror it seems to be going for until the very third act, where She drags He back to their cabin and the film's bleakness finally manages to sink into the viewer's bones. What ultimately redeems Antichrist is its brilliant cinematography, Gainsbourg's performance (although she's not nearly as flawless as some critics would lead you to believe) and, most of all, its ideas. My interpretations (**SPOILERS**): --Nature is evil, what with all the endless death and predation and wretchedness, so it could not have been created by God. It was created by Satan. Applying ancient gender stereotypes (even the old "women are clingy and afraid of men leaving them" gets thrown into the mix), the film posits that women are closer to nature (the "Mother" in "Mother Nature"), and therefore inherently evil. Men are just as evil, but like Willem Dafoe's smug asshole of a therapist, they don't realize it, and try to impose reason and order upon Nature, where as a talking auto-cannibalistic fox points out, "chaos reigns!" He thinks he can rationalize away his inherent murderous animalism, but in the end, nature will drag him back down with his female counterparts. --Sex is evil. In another interview, von Trier has mentioned that he thinks sex is something that holds human beings back from truly being civilized. So, in Antichrist language: She is a woman, woman is nature, nature is barbaric, sex is nature, She wants sex constantly, sex is barbaric. He and She are divided by sex, both the physical act and gender. It is the natural catalyst for their downward spiral. Their child dies while the two are fucking, and She is too far-gone in mid-orgasm to care as she sees her son topple out the window. This is what re-ignites her self-hating madness. --Charlotte Gainsbourg's character goes progressively more insane researching gynocide, the killing of women by men. She comes to believe that all women are just as evil as they are portrayed in the Bible and other historical texts ("A crying woman is a scheming woman..."). What's more, she fears that gynocide is the natural order of things (He: "I am nature" She: "What do you want, Mr. Nature?" He: "To hurt you as much as I can.") He dismisses this as ridiculous, but as She goes progressively more insane and violent, Nature seemingly guides him toward Her conclusion, and he eventually murders her and burns her body. Nature rewards him with food for following out with its plans. The implication being that gynocide and misogyny are part of nature, and are an inherited Darwinian trait. Which is, unfortunately, true (examine the behaviors of all animal species in existence--the VAST majority are male-dominated, even non-sentient organisms; nature favors the male on top for some reason). von Trier has sneakily, and probably facetiously, encoded a psuedo-feminist subtext here to counter the film's over-the-top misogyny: If Nature is evil and Satanic, then so is misogyny, as it is a big part of nature. Oh, Lars, you joker! Does Lars von Trier hate women? I honestly don't know. The constant accusations of misogyny he's accumulated in Phase II of his career (Breaking the Waves and everything since) have always struck me as missing the point. von Trier characters are not people, they are Ideas dressed up in human form. When Emily Watson, Bjork and Nicole Kidman are subjected to horrific treatment in his films, it is not because they are women, it is because their characters represent something. It's no different in his earlier films, where the male protagonists suffer equally horrible, drawn out fates (see the end of Europa). In a recent interview, von Trier stated that he thinks "women are just as bad as men," which, its prankster-ish wording aside, is more than anything a sensibly misanthropic point of view. All his films are profoundly misanthropic--few filmmakers continually show more contempt for our woeful race than von Trier, and god bless him for it. This still doesn't excuse him from being a MAJOR asshole, though. |
October 25, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Winged Migration (Le Peuple Migrateur) - G | September 2, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Julie & Julia - PG-13 | September 2, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - PG | August 30, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo) (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea) - G | August 30, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Dai-Nipponjin (Big Man Japan) - PG-13 | August 20, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Hannibal - R |
Hannibal in no way lives up to its cinematic predecessor, The Silence of the Lambs (one of the top ten greatest films ever made). It technically isn't even a very good film on its own: the plot drags and is completely lacking in suspense, many of the supporting performances outside of Hopkins, Moore and Oldman are incredibly weak, and Ridley Scott too often resorts to lame music video visual trickery. That said, it's still an improvement on the terrible book, and Hannibal does have one thing going for it: it's f**king hilarious. Gary Oldman's embodiment of hideously disfigured pedophile Mason Verger is one of the most amusing performances in cinema history. Everything he says, in that arch, whiny voice immediately becomes pure comic gold. It doesn't matter what the topic of discussion is: "poor cast-off little boys and girls who'd do anything for a candy bar", cutting his own face off and feeding it to the dogs (the scene's punchline--"It seemed like a good idea at the time..."--has to be among the most priceless lines in film), or monologuing to Hannibal his evil plan to feed him to giant ravenous boars (ha!). It's all hilarious. Hopkins latches on to this spirit, too: he turns the dial of his Vocal Mannerisms control and switches it to "extreme camp"--Hannibal, paragon of evil, spouts lines like "okey dokey" while barely suppressing a nasty chuckle. The film is saved by its unrestrained silliness, but it does have some strong serious points; Julianne Moore is game as the more hardened Clarice, and Scott does manage to pull off two brilliant sequences: the flashback scene of Mason Verger providing his doggies with some facial food (complete with incomparable punchline) and the final confrontation between Clarice and Hannibal. Its the only other scene that perfectly melds the humor and horror the film otherwise fails to balance, and is a rare reminder that Scott once used to have real talent. Plus, it pisses all over the dreadful ending of the book. At least like Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal is another rare example of a film that bests the book. |
August 13, 2009 | N/A | |||
| You Got Served - PG-13 | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Freedom Writers - PG-13 | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Little Rascals - PG | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Ali - R | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Matchstick Men - PG-13 | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Practical Magic - PG-13 | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Miss Congeniality - PG-13 | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Green Mile - R | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Gone in 60 Seconds (Gone in Sixty Seconds) - PG-13 | August 13, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Jumanji - PG | August 13, 2009 | N/A |
1111 ratings
321 reviews
