Sergio Leone looooves his music. And its very important to his style of film-making. He is an expert in drawing out tension from scenes and hitting just the right amount of importance for certain moments with the right notes of music. Once Upon a Time in the West has a lot of that, which makes […]
Posts Tagged ‘film club’
Film Club Review – Once Upon a Time in the West
August 15, 2014Film Club Review – Frequency
August 22, 2013My Review Frequency Frequency is an interesting little number in which, through some atmospheric anomaly, a man in 1999 is able to communicate with his father from 30 years early through a radio. And in doing so, the son is able to warn his father of his impending death the very next day. Its a […]
Film Club Review – Monsters
July 29, 2013My Review Monsters In the spirit of Cloverfield, Monsters sees a movie monster situation through the eyes of the innocent bystanders. In Monsters, an accidental alien invasion has created an infected zone in Mexico in which alien creatures are contained. A journalist must try to get his bosses daughter to safety by leading her through […]
Film Club Review – Side Effects
July 24, 2013My Review Side Effects Steven Soderberg’s Side Effects is a thriller which explores the use of mental health medication, and I couldn’t help but think that Soderberg is really out to make us paranoid: he tries to make us fear prescription drugs, germs, male strippers… Anyways, Side Effects turns out to be a pretty good […]
Film Club Review – Leon: The Professional
June 12, 2013Leon is about the best hitman in the business who ends up looking after the 12 year old girl living next door when her family is killed. And so begins a pretty damn cool movie. Leon is a film with great characters, great action, and great cinematography. I love the glimpse we get into the […]
Film Club Review: Pitch Black
January 12, 2013Pitch 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
August 2, 201213 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
April 10, 2012Summary: 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
February 3, 2012Well…. 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
January 7, 2012What 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
December 26, 20114 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
August 18, 2011One 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 – In the Loop
July 17, 2011In 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
July 2, 2011I’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 […]
Ian's Movie Reviews 