Movie Diary 11/10/2009

2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009). Can’t review the movie before it opens, of course; that would be illegal. But I can say that my weakness for the cinema of Roland Emmerich will not be cured here. (Main problem with 10,000 BC, in retrospect: no big buildings to demolish.) Liking this gasser of a movie wasn’t easy at [...]

Movie Diary 11/9/2009

Catching up on a weekend of movie watching.
The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009). That’s a whole lot of sinister portents for one movie, especially when so many portents aren’t even portending anything – they’re just weird details waiting to be deciphered. (full review here).
A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959). Time has not withered the delights [...]

Men Who Stare at Fourth Kind Education (Weekly Links)

Movies I reviewed for The Herald this week (reviews of The Box and 35 Shots of Rum tomorrow):
A Christmas Carol. “The most prominent special effect is still Jim Carrey.”
The Men Who Stare at Goats. “A groovy approach to waging war.”
An Education. “The blend of a female perspective with Hornby’s boy-centric sensibility is just exactly right.”
The [...]

Movie Diary 11/4/2009

Araya (Margot Benacerraf, 1959). A movie that won the International Critics Prize at Cannes (shared with Hiroshima, Mon Amour) and then was barely heard from again, now gorgeously restored by Milestone Films. It’s an eye-filler, with a spellbinding docu-subject: harvesting salt from a briny marsh on the Venezuela coast. (full review 11/13)
The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock, 2009). [...]

Movie Diary 11/3/2009

Pirate Radio (Richard Curtis, 2009). More Love, Actually than Four Weddings and a Funeral. And that for me is not good news. (full review 11/13)
The Fourth Kind (Olatunde Osunsnmi, 2009). Brush up on your Sumerian, people, ‘cuz the ancient alien visitors are still speaking it. At least when they come to communicate through our puny Earthling [...]

Movie Diary 11/2/2009

Catching up on a weekend of movies.
The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, 2009). George Clooney in a few hilarious wigs, Jeff Bridges Dude-ing out, the movie not quite hitting its Strangelovian possibilities. (full review 11/6)
The Messenger (Oren Moverman, 2009). Ben Foster, heretofore a somewhat spastically ornate actor, must play it straight as an Iraq War vet [...]

This is Beeswax on the Rocks (Weekly Links)

Reviews I wrote for the Herald this week.
Michael Jackson’s This is It. “Debunks the theory that Jackson was working on a dud.”
Chelsea on the Rocks. “Sloppy and meandering and completely enamored of its shabby-chic subject.”
Irene in Time. “In Jaglom’s movies, it never seems to occur to an actor that silence and under-emphasis might qualify as [...]

Movie Diary 10/28/2009

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009). It’s hard to know what exactly is happening with this movie, but relatively easy to dig it. Nic Cage, we like you untethered, and Herzog is just the man to throw away the leash. (full review 11/25)
Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski, 2009). Maybe you don’t like [...]

Movie Diary 10/27/2009

This is It (Kenny Ortega, 2009). Okay, better than anticipated. Dude may have been a freak, but at the end he had it together physically and creatively, and you can’t argue with his sense of theater. (full review 10/30)
The Horse Boy (Michel O. Scott, 2009). Doc about an autistic child, carried by his try-anything parents [...]

Movie Diary 10/26/2009

Irene in Time (Henry Jaglom, 2009). Jaglom’s still going at it, these days with his latest protegee, Tanna Frederick, who makes a point of not leaving any emotion unexpressed – but then it’s a Henry Jaglom movie, what would you expect? This time out the nattering women are talking about their fathers, the men are [...]