Film Club Review: Pitch Black

Pitch Black is the story of a a spaceship full of people who crash land on an unknown planet inhabited by dangerous alien creatures. Even though the planet has three suns, they happened to have gotten there at a time where a particular planet alignment blocks the suns, and allows these creatures to come out […]

Film Club Review: 13 Assassins

13 Assassins is a story about 13 samurai who are hired to kill a sadistic lord before he rises higher in the shogun’s counsel. Its similar to Seven Samurai in plot structure (and time period) except that they are on the offense instead of the defense. The first part of this movie is about establishing […]

Film Club Review: Conan O’Brian Can’t Stop

Summary: A documentary of Conan O’Brian getting his tour ready after he was kicked off TV by NBC. Whats great about it is that he’s obviously pissed off at what happened to him, but he’s trying to contain his anger as best he can, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. Its really quite fascinating to watch. […]

Film Club Review – Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

Well…. what do I say? I must confess that this started off very confusingly for me. I felt thrown in to a situation where I wasn’t given any opportunity to connect with the characters in this film, and as a result I felt like I was simply being tugged through the rest of the time. […]

Film Club Review – OSS 117: Lost in Rio

What a great comedy. This French James Bond spoof set in Brazil scratched just the right comedy itch. As a Bond spoof its not nearly as over-the-top as Austin Powers, but its just as hilarious. Jean Dujardin hit just the right note as Hubert de la Bath, France’s top womanizing spy. He has a sort […]

Film Club Review – 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days

4 Months etc. is a film about a woman helping her roommate have an illegal abortion in Communist Romania during the 80s. The movie starts out in a drab student dormitory where Otilia is helping her friend Gabi pack for a three night stay in a hotel room. We don’t know what its for until […]

Film Club Review – Ran

One of Kurosawa’s later films, Ran tells the story of a Japanese warlord with three sons who has decided to step down from power. I went into the movie excepting a visual feast, but what I got was a feast of high drama. I guess with a plot based from Shakespeare, I should have expected […]

Film Club Review – Metropolitan

Metropolitan is a story about the high class New York socialite society in the late 20th century. When the movie starts out, a group of young socialite are meeting and having having a lot of conversations which require a lot of big, educated words and ideas. Whether this is an attempt at irony regarding pretentiousness […]

Film Club Review – In the Loop

In the Loop Although a movie has many aspects, each individual film usually has one of these aspects which the rest are centered around. Some times they are centered around characters, sometimes around plot, other times around setting…. and sometimes they are centered around dialogue. In the Loop is one of the latter. This movie […]

Film Club Review – Giant

I’ve heard Giant described as a “low-rent Gone with the Wind.” That’s not too off the mark. I’d describe it as Gone With the Wind without a purpose. Giant’s main problem is its lack of focus. It seems to be all over the map, trying to be too many things at once and not really […]

Film Club Review – Modern Times

I will not claim that I am a Chaplin expert as I have only seen three of his films, the other two being City Lights and The Gold Rush. But compared to those other two, Modern Times falls slightly short. It is very strong elements but also some weaker aspects. The main problem though is […]

Film Club Review – Sunshine: Revisited

A while back I was recommended Sunshine in the film club I am a part of.  My review, which I also posted on this blog, was one of the weirdest I’ve written since it was one of the oddest movie experiences I’ve had. I didn’t even give it a rating at all. My original review […]

Film Club Review – Man on Wire

Its fascinating how a documentarian can take a subject which doesn’t seem like it would have a lot to it and turns it into an interesting and compelling story. That’s what happens here with Man on Wire, the story of a man in the 70s, Phillipe Petit, who decides to tightrope walk between the world […]

Flim Club Review – City Lights

City Lights City Lights is a silent movie which was released in a time when talkies were taking over and silent films were soon to be no more. But being a silent movie, this story about a tramp who falls for a blind girl and tries to find enough money to support her and pay […]

Film Club Review – Encounters at the End of the World

Encounters at the End of the World Werner Herzog’s documentary about Antarctica is a coin with two sides, one positive and one negative. On the positive side, it is a really interesting look at this little-understood continent. Herzog shows us lesser explored aspects of Antarctica and not just the “fuzzy penguins” (though even Herzog himself […]