What I’m Watching: Two Broke Girls
The leaves are dropping and getting crunchy. I’ve donned my first pair of patterned tights for the season. Fall is officially here and with it a brand new TV schedule. Why Thanksgiving is not aligned with premiere week, I will never know — I could definitely use some pie to accompany this couch potato. Since … Continue reading
Family, the hard way
I have walked out of a film once in my life and sat through a great deal more that I probably shouldn’t have (Lady in the Water (2006) comes to mind). That one time occurred when a friend of mine, who was a fan of kung-fu films but lacked the healthy irony such fandom requires, … Continue reading
Guns of Icarus
If you are anything like me, you got sick of steampunk around the same time you stopped reading Boing Boing. My initial delight with steampunk is almost certainly connected to my love of good sci-fi and fantasy. The connection between magic and technology is nearly essential for the genre, if only for two reasons: My … Continue reading
There are trolls in them thar hills
I clearly haven’t been paying enough attention to U-verse’s On Demand feature, because it turns out that they’ve been offering advanced rentals of movies not yet in theatres for some time now. What kind of cinephile am I? Since this discovery I have been known to occasionally shut off my Netflix streaming (only occasionally) and … Continue reading
Book reviews for the comic lover’s soul
I’ve been noticing things getting more graphic. I see comics everywhere—on billboards and the subway and nerdy girls’ Adrian Tomine tote bags. There’s an entire section in a local comic shop devoted to graphic versions of the classics. You can read Jane Erye in word bubbles, friends. That shit has been drawn and paneled. Suddenly … Continue reading
A rock in the shoe: my love-hate relationship with Lars Von Trier, Pt. 1
I had long been considering writing a piece about Danish director, Lars Von Trier, but had never really gotten around to it. Then, at the Cannes film festival press conference for his latest film, Melancholia, Von Trier declared himself to be a “Nazi” and “sympathetic to Hitler.” Well, all right. I suppose that now is … Continue reading
How Robert Altman helped me justify being lazy in film school – Pt. 1
There was a solid stretch of time during my early goings in film school where I thought that I might be in some trouble. I worried about my disinterest in traditional screenplays or, more to the point, the screenplay itself. That is not as to say that I didn’t and don’t appreciate them (I read … Continue reading
My Aussie double-header (insert sex joke here)*
Australia is not really known as a hub of great film, for the most part. There have been some great ones, though, like Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), in which three aboriginal sisters escape a school training them as domestic staff, intending to return to their mother. They are tracked by another aboriginal named Moodoo, played … Continue reading
With friends like these. . .
The cockneys sure have a way with words, don’t they? One of the words they have a way with is “cunt,” which usually takes the place of people’s names and serves nicely as a blunt little exclamation point. If the word offends you, steer clear of 44 Inch Chest (2010), as it contains an incalculable … Continue reading
Those who serve
Somewhere in Paris there is a room, sparsely decorated and populated by one man and his caged bird. The man lies on his bed, cigarette smoke billowing above his head. Later he will rise, don a trench coat and hat and head out into the city to set up alibis for the murder he is … Continue reading
