I liked this movie when I watched it in 2001 after really liking Lovely & Amazing. A relatable realistic film about female friendship. It is Okay.
The weird thing is that every couple of years my brain suddenly recalls a minor episode in which Catherine Keener goes on a why-not date with a neighborhood dude she and her best friend have dubbed "the ugly guy." He takes her to a horror convention, they sleep together, and she realizes that despite going…
The first time I watched Viy, I'd just seen a clip from the banger last act, so I spent most of the movie twiddling my thumbs waiting for it to get to the awesome part. Then I watched it again with my husband, and from the start he had a blast with it, and made me realize that for the first two acts, this movie is actually very funny? Plenty of laughs wrung out from our lazy, cowardly hero who…
Some great visual storytellling and daring abstraction, the kind of thing you'd expect from a famous graphic designer turned director. But also... draggy and not as smart as it thinks it is, with scientist protagonists almost as dumb and careless as latter-day Alien-franchise characters. I tried to stay engaged with the long sequences following ant actors. But sorry, Saul Bass, I kept losing interest and drifting off to my second screen.
Except I'm not actually sorry, Mr. Bass, because on…
Feels like they made a bit of an unforced error with the cover/poster for this one. The image of a wide-eyed young woman with a bandaged head saying "Cuckoo" makes it seem like some Girl, Interrupted kind of thing and... it's definitely not that. It's much much weirder and more interesting. Among other things, this has a shadow scare on par with the swimming pool scene in the original 1942 Cat People. Worth watching just for that and Hunter Schafer's confident central performance.
Watched the original Albert Pyun cut, screened by Justin Decloux. This is an incredibly somber Vietnam-coded movie, which it shows by having Cap's mentor pretty much just say it. For his crucial mission Captain America is barely prepared and set up to fail, he pays the price and history forgets him. If you've ever wanted to see Captain America done with Born on the Fourth of July vibes, first off who are you, why do you want that? But this…
We used to regularly get DVDs collecting short films and music videos. One such DVD advertised Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut. I misread the order of the videos, so I watched a documentary in black and white about the Wall of Death motorcycle stunt thinking it was JGL's short film. "Wow, this is so austere and disciplined in its storytelling," I thought, "not at all what I would expect an actor to make. I'm so impressed."
Turned out that was a…
