Black Swan

I'm am not an expert on Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," the ballet at the center of the Darren Aronofsky-directed thriller "Black Swan," (though I enjoy listening to it for relaxation). But I do know a thing or two about unpredictability after reading Nassim Nicholas Talem's "The Black Swan," a philosophy...

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Letterbox

Let me first say that it has been exactly one year since my blog started. To be honest, I began writing most of the reviews that are dated on December 25, 2009 between October and late December, and after viewing Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus" on Christmas, there was a mad rush to figure out a quick, efficient and inexpensive way to share my ideas on the internet, which brought...

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The Strangest Movies of the 1970s

El Topo Alejandro Jodorowsky's Western features a man in black accompanied by a naked child throughout the desert against little people and maimed people and naked women with a background of religious symbolism and drug-induced cinematography. This film, recently released on DVD and once a feature of midnight cinemas, is a better film than his follow-up, the even more psychadelic "Holy Mountain,"...

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The Funniest Videos on Youtube

Sometimes I think Youtube was made for me. Buried deep in the vast pit of self-made cat videos, archival footage of historical events, and your favorite old TV shows are the most absurdly hilarious videos imaginable. In my opinion, some of them include the following: McDonalds Custodial Training Video One...

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Dave

James Newton Howard's score starts off "Dave" with that certain "West Wing" sense of optimism. The music would be fitting for a president, except the president in this film doesn't seem to like Washington, his wife, or even his dogs as he throws the leash to the ground as soon as he's away from the cameras. Dave (Kevin Kline), however, is perfectly happy in his working-class job as the manager of...

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A Tribute to Tim Curry

When I was a kid, Tim Curry was in everything. He was the creepy (and by creepy I mean so scary that his fellow cast members avoided him) clown that helped make "It" regarded as the most frightening television miniseries in history. He was singing as a river of destructive oil in "Ferngully: The...

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Barack Obama and the Dangers of the Center

A friend once explained to me the strategy of tic-tac-toe. Everyone who has ever played the game, he said, has at least once strove for the center of the board. The thinking is that the center offers the greatest destination for security. But the center gives the illusion of safety, my friend told...

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Machete

The opening sequences of "Machete" start in the same style of Robert Rodriquez's "Planet Terror" portion of "Grindhouse," with scratchy film as a homage to the 1970s grindhouse films he enjoyed. There is head-slicing from the beginning as the title character, played by Danny Trejo, storms a rusty old house filled with bad guys and carries a woman to safety. The woman, while still unclothed, returns...

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Toy Story 3

The previous "Toy Story" films centered around a boy named Andy and his toys. "What are my toys doing when I leave my room?" must have been a universal question for young children when they saw the first film fifteen years ago and the impetus for such a film. "What should I do with my toys now that I've grown up?" is probably no less common of a question. In "Toy Story 3," Andy (voiced in all...

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Easy A

"If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances." Thus wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose "The Scarlet Letter" serves as an influence for Will Gluck's "Easy A," a film about a teenage girl who indeed has dreamed strange things and tried to make them look truthful with unending consequences. Emma Stone is Olive, a sharp...

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The Expendables

Roger Ebert used his review of "Shaolin Soccer" as a vehicle to describe his theory of the star-rating system in movies. He said, "When you ask a friend if 'Hellboy' is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to 'Mystic River,' you're asking if it's any good compared to 'The Punisher.' And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if 'Superman' is four, then 'Hellboy' is three,...

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Arbitrary but Admirable Movies

The DMZ What I like to consider the "Pather Panchali" of Korean cinema, Park Sang-ho's 1965 Korean semi-documentary "The DMZ" (or "Bimujangjidae" in Korean) is a film once thought to be lost forever but was recently discovered. While possessing nice shots and a definite amount of risk (filming in...

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The Ghost Writer

In "The Ghost Writer," Ewan McGregor's character, simply credited as the Ghost, is reassured by someone that he cannot be killed like his predecessor was, because ghostwriters are not cats. This is little comfort to the Ghost, for he is well-aware that he (like many characters in Roman Polanski's films), is someone in conditions that do not favor him, and against characters that are not ones to advance...

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A Fish Called Wanda

Many have noted filmmaker Errol Morris' article in the New York Times on anosognosia. Morris tells the story of David Dunning, a professor of social psychology at Cornell University, reading the newspaper to discover a bizarre story. The article was about a man named McArthur Wheeler who was arrested after attempting to rob two Pittsburgh banks. He attempted to rob the banks in daylight, but what...

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Inception

Christopher Nolan's "Inception" is a film about characters who perchance to dream. There is something deeply philosophical and fascinating about man's ability to dream, to analyze and reflect on one's own dreams, one's own nightmares, that offers women and men the ability to command such creative power that would make everyone a Dante or Shakespeare, as H.F. Hedge put it, and Nolan capitalizes on...

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Empire of the Sun

Steven Spielberg has created a legacy as the ultimate magician of the cinema. His movies have, for the most part, been bright, magical pictures, as is the case here in his 1987 film "Empire of the Sun." With this film, a coming-of-age World War II story, Spielberg indulges in familiar formulas: a lost boy without his parents, a yearning towards reconciliation, a feeling of miraculousness. Almost...

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The Dead Zone

As the film opens, Christopher Walken, the patron saint of eccentricity in the movies, is reading out loud Poe's "The Raven" to a classroom of students. It is immediately clear that his will be an enjoyable film. David Cronenberg's "The Dead Zone," from a screenplay by Jeffrey Boam based on Stephen King's novel, is an epic picture, despite its relatively short length of about 103 minutes, and immensely...

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The Giant Claw

I used to think that the "best worst movie" ever was "The Tingler" from 1959. Starring Vincent Price as a doctor studying the psychological aspects of fear, what started as a rather interesting psychological thriller with some witty dialogue evolved into a bizzare monster movie; the tingler was, if I recall correctly, some sort of creation born in the spine when someone developed fear. Price's character...

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A Simple Plan

It's all quite Hitchcockian. These are ordinary characters caught up in extraordinary circumstances. There are even symbolic black crows guarding a destroyed plane, a sort of Pandora's Box. Sam Raimi's "A Simple Plan," from 1998, does Hitchcock better than most other post-Hitch films. The film reunites Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thorton, who both starred in "One False Move" six years earlier. Paxton...

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Outrage

There is a respectable person speaking about himself being so respectable in the opening moments of Kirby Dick's "Outrage." This "respectable person" "doesn't do those things." The respectable person is Larry Craig. Those things are gay things. Larry Craig, in case one has forgotten, is the former senator of the state of Idaho (a state where, like Iran, there are no gay people). He had famously...

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