So my self-imposed challenge of the month of September was to write one blog entry a day – short little squibs, at the very least, then stretched if the movie, good or bad, warranted the extra space. So far, so good; except for a couple days here and there, I was able to muster the [...]
Since we’re experiencing a relative heatwave in the Bay Area, I thought I’d write about something vaguely appropriate. Bill Viola’s video is set in a 5,000-square kilometer salt lake in the Sahara Desert that receives 100 millimeters of rain a year, according to Wikipedia. (Chott el-Djerid is also famous for something entirely cinematically different: it [...]
As you folks can probably tell, I’m working my way through the summer movie franchises — for it certainly feels like summer in the Bay Area right now — and Blade nicely satisfies my jones for action-fantasy, especially if gouts of blood are involved. (You could do worse, like with Resident Evil, or with any [...]
Oh to live in a world populated by endless Kylies, in all their pink and light blue splendor, blonde curls forever tossed by the wind, a bombshell calmly oblivious to the chaos blooming around her, duplicate upon duplicate, doubling and redoubling into infinity. Or it may be some sort of cursed recursion, a tangled loop [...]
I could go on and on about how beautiful the Polish brothers’ Northfork looks – the way light shines through feathers, the stark gray beauty of the Montana landscape, the loneliness of weather-beaten farmhouses and the vastness of the sky swallowing them up, the visual humor of six men in black suits and hats filling [...]
Pointless, except for the one at the tip of the hatchet. Adam Green’s Hatchet — lauded, apparently, by Harry Knowles and MTV and genre film fests worldwide — was billed as “Old School American Horror,” which sounds a bit like a Chevy truck recall: “It’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel, and it’s not [...]
For all the Coen Brothers’ supposed cleverness and flash — and I mean it here in a pejorative sense — one almost forgets that they can be capable of tight, disciplined writing as well. The first five minutes of their debut film, Blood Simple, for instance, is a fantastic example of perfect narrative compression. (I [...]
Nasty and depraved fun, though the latter is almost wholly dependent on whether you watch this movie with like-minded individuals in advanced stages of alcohol-induced fuzziness. The other factor, of course, is whether you’re the sort who’d actually enjoy watching a film about a mad scientist, three hapless and expendable tourists and a rather unsettling [...]
The thing about leaving your childhood behind for the world of adults is that you’re actually too young to fully appreciate that bittersweet period, good or bad. Toy Story 3 makes that leave-taking the emotional core of the film, and a fitting, almost moving conclusion to this three-part saga about plastic characters. But calling them [...]
By now the pleasures and contradictions of Inception have already been enumerated and dissected to exhaustion: that damn spinning top, floor plans of its dream architecture, the way Hans Zimmer’s trombone-heavy soundtrack is really “Je, ne regrette rien” slowed to a dreamlike sluggishness, how it violates screenwriting principles by unthinkably burdening it with exposition for [...]
What does a Kurosawa film sound like? Is it the metallic whoosh of swords, or the peal of temple bells. Or is it all about the music, a martial theme, or a spare and cold Toru Takemitsu soundtrack? href=”http://filmeyeballsbrain.com/2010/07/18/akira-kurosawa-stray-dog-1949/”> (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0], rdb = document.createElement(‘script’); rdb.type = ‘text/javascript’; rdb.async = true; rdb.src [...]
[Crossposted on Goodreads.] I was really looking forward to picking up this book — movies being a passionate interest of mine — but found it to be a rather uneven collection. Organized, kind of, around the provocative question “if movie-watching has become in itself a primary source of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are [...]
Look: if you’re a Thai director who chooses to begin your film with a static shot of jungle foliage swaying in the wind, then proceeds with a languid, dreamlike narrative — well, it seems to me like asking for a bit of trouble. Like Duncan Jones doing an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey in [...]
I struck gold immediately with my first viewing at the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival, Ounie Lecomte’s beautifully understated debut, A Brand New Life (Yeo-haeng-ja). (See preview here.) I can see audiences responding positively to this (I’m hoping for wider distribution), for its unfussy plainness is easy to like – and that’s not necessarily [...]
I’d forgotten – particularly amidst all the remembrances of the depth of his humanism, his experiment with narrative in Rashomon (1950), the magisterial sweep of his epics – how surprisingly… well, goofy, Akira Kurosawa’s sense of humor seemed to be. Take a scene in Sanjuro, the underrated companion to the undisputed 1961 classic Yojimbo. It’s no [...]
The Wily Filipino