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Indiana Jones seeks fortune and glory in The Temple of Doom
In order to catch up on the overwhelming backlog of movies I intend to cover here on this blog, I’m going to keep it brief with a few disconnected thoughts: An opening caption places the action in “1935.” Raiders of the Lost Ark was set in 1936, so, The Temple of Doom is actually a…
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They don’t make PG movies anymore like Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark
In order to catch up on the overwhelming backlog of movies I intend to cover here on this blog, this blogger is forced to cover Raiders of the Lost Ark with only a few disconnected observations: The 2008 DVD reissues of the classic Indiana Jones trilogy have terribly designed menus; it looks like everything’s been…
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Who do you think you are, Mr. Big? Sex and the City: The Movie
Yep, I saw it. I work for the movie company that produced it, so I got to go for free. The standard line with Michael Patrick King’s now decade-old Sex and the City franchise is that it has always appealed mostly to gay men and the women that love them. Even though this blogger more…
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Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the second worst Indiana Jones movie
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is ultimately disappointing, especially if one reflects too much on its plot and basic plausibility, but it not totally without redeeming qualities. It is also far from the worst entry in the franchise (that would be Temple of Doom – blech! stay tuned for our forthcoming…
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Laura Veirs live at Bowery Ballroom, New York
This blogger has been a big fan of the bespectacled, water-obsessed Laura Veirs ever since first discovering her infectious song “Galaxies” on the late & lamented MP3 blog Salon Audiofile in 2005. Why it was not a huge hit, featured in iPod and car commercials, or soundtracking the denouements of The O.C. or Gray’s Anatomy,…
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Tim Roth undertakes an old man’s folly in Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth
Youth Without Youth received a shockingly poor reception for the first film in years from a major filmmaker, garnering a middling 43 on Metacritic and a painful 29 from RottenTomatoes. In January 2008, this blogger found himself in a room with a bunch of journalists from genre publications like Fangoria and ComingSoon.net (Weird, right? It…
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Jake Kasdan spoofs the musical biopic in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
This blogger finds most so-called biopics wanting. The two- to three-hour feature film format is more akin to an essay or short story than a book, and as such is ill-equipped to sum up the entire life of a human being in more than a string of highlights. Yet studios and filmmakers keep churning out…
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26 Albums I’m Told I Should Remove From My Collection
Chalkills, the XTC fansite, wants to help you sift through the detritus of your music collection, pronto: One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately (spotted on DGMLive). I own (or once owned) a whopping 26% of these overrated (so they say) canonical classics! Hey, Chalkhills, what did I ever do to you?…
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Who abandoned whom in Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages?
The Savages is the story of a fractured family, separated not least by geography, that reunites on the occasion of an aged parent’s health. Both siblings haven’t seen their father in years, so what was probably a slow decline seems to them a sudden plunge into senility. Both have their own problems, and neither is…
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Todd Haynes deconstructs Bob Dylan in I’m Not There
I always find it interesting to ponder my preconceived notions of a movie after I’ve actually seen it. The marketing and buzz on I’m Not There mostly centered on two talking points: the quirky device of multiple actors all playing incarnations of Bob Dylan, and Cate Blanchett being just plain amazing as usual (what else…
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The camera is an eye, in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Julian Schnabel is an artist-turned-filmmaker, evidently preoccupied with the lives of other artists and writers: Jean-Michel Basquiat in Basquiat, Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls, and now Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Several years ago, this blogger designed Fine Line Features’ official website for Before Night Falls. But frankly, I had…
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Sebastian Schrade’s tour documentary Low in Europe
I came late to appreciating Low, but they have since become one of my favorite bands. I was vaguely aware that trainspotting music critics had christened a genre to categorize bands like Low: slowcore, the distinguishing characteristics of which being playing very quietly and slowly. An overgeneralization, it turns out, but it never hurts to…