Brian Rice

Brian Rice

Favorite films

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • A Town Called Panic
  • Ran
  • Porco Rosso

Recent activity

All
  • Ex-Husbands

    ★★★★

  • The Conversation

    ★★★★★

  • An Affair to Remember

    ★★★

  • The King of Comedy

    ★★★★★

Recent reviews

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  • Ex-Husbands

    Ex-Husbands

    ★★★★

    Solid movie on a small budget. Griffin Dunne does great work with an aging patriarch character, and the dialog really works pretty naturalistically. There's a bit of a gap in the setup that the audience is trusted to roll with, but otherwise it's a proverbial good indie flick about aging, family, and relationships, and doesn't offer pat framings or answers.

    Also, on a personal note, the actors and writer-director were there presenting, and I happened to walk in on Griffin Dunne at a urinal in the bathroom, and pointedly avoided making an After Hours joke. It must happen to him.

  • The Conversation

    The Conversation

    ★★★★★

    Great watching this as an adult. This film keeps working on multiple levels, and has one of those scripts where no one is a good communicator but everything is tight and loaded with meaning.

    That said, 50 years after it was first made, we're all now so steeped in surveillance and social engineering (well, software professionals), that all of the mistakes look inane, and instead you focus on why the characters are making those mistakes, and what that says. Which is still good, but some of the shock value now must be retroactively imagined.

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  • Porcelain War

    Porcelain War

    ★★★★

    You don't usually get to see a quality self-shot war correspondence, or an artist's view of their own life as a soldier, and this manages to be both. It would be nice to think this movie would change how some people feel, but we live in heavily propagandized times.

    The filmmakers magnify the significance or iconography of their own work in the middle of this, which is a little much, but honestly it makes sense to highlight any kind of creation in the middle of destruction.

  • The Fall

    The Fall

    ★★★★½

    This film is a marvel that should be seen by more people. I had no idea when I saw it at a film festival in 2006 that it would be an unmarketed rarity. It's very imaginative, giving a child's perspective a lot of depth and even characterizing the child's predicament very well. And it's very dark thematically, while also being genuinely funny. It's held up very well after 18 years.

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