remembering the films that the audience forgot
“I didn’t read reviews earlier in my career, but I read them now as I’m older. I read them all.”
— Steven Spielberg
El Rey De La Montaña (King Of The Hill) begins with a man stopping to get gas. While his car fills up he goes to the bathroom. In the bathroom he meets an attractive woman and they have sex. I know, it sounds like a good thing right? Well, in this case it begins a chain of events that lead to him, and said woman, running through the woods being stalked by unknown snipers.
Read MoreThis film brings together 5 different stories that all revolve around each other and culminate with a couple car accidents that take place at 11:14pm one evening. The film is one story told from 5 different perspectives. Kind of like the filmVantage Point. But unlike Vantage Point, 11:14 is really good.
Read MoreThe Squid And The Whale is about a family breaking up in Brooklyn, New York in 1986 - and right when the film begins we see what side everyone is going to be on: The opening scene is of the family playing tennis with the dad and the older son on one side of the net and the mother on the other side with the younger boy. These are the two teams and this divide is just made more evident when the parents split up and the kids are forced to split their time between them.
Read MoreWhile photography is pretty singularly a visual medium and books are a medium very much completely reliant on the words - film is an art form that spans mediums. The words are just as important a component to the success of a film (I mean artistic success - not commercial) as is how the film looks and what it does visually, both large and small (people who talk about film tend to sometimes forget that a low-budget film, or one that forgoes large sets and special effects, is still making a visual statement).
Read MoreMarc Forster is not a director stuck to one genre. After Monsters Ball (which I didn't think was as great as the praise it received) put him on the map back in 2001, he followed that up with the wonderful Finding Neverland. Then a couple years later he gave us Stranger Than Fiction - and has since gone on to direct a James Bond film: Quantum of Solace and World War Z. He was also the man at the helm of The Kite Runner. And then there’s Stay, which he did back in 2005.
Stay is an interesting film for me to write about here, because, while I did like it, I can see where people have problems with it. However, for me, the problems seemed to bother me much less than as much as the film completely intrigued me.
Read MoreBetween 2001 and 2005, director Oliver Hirschbiegel made four films in his native Germany - two of which were the pretty good Das Experiment and the great Downfall (I haven't seen the other two). Then in 2007 he faltered hard with his first english language film, the not good movie that was The Invasion.
Thankfully he got back up on the horse and in 2009 delivered Five Minutes Of Heaven, a film about truth and reconciliation that, in a way, is a reconciliation of its own with fans of Hirschbiegel who had sat through The Invasion - okay, so that's me being a bit over dramatic, but I liked the metaphor so I went with it.
Read MoreBack about a decade ago I was browsing Netflix looking for a movie to watch and Exam came up as a suggestion based on the hundreds of movies I had rated and liked/disliked, etc… Now, generally I was not impressed with these suggestion services, but in the case of Exam, Netflix did good.
The film begins with eight strangers competing for a job, entering a windowless room and sitting at their assigned desks. Then an invigilator enters the room, tells them the rules of the exam, puts 80 minutes on the clock and walks out, leaving behind the eight applicants and an armed guard.
Read MoreFor my birthday back over a decade ago one of my best friends gave me the No Direction Home dvd (remember DVDs?). I was very happy when I got it and added it to my DVD collection right away. However, as anyone with a large movie collection can tell you, it’s very easy for movies to get lost in there. And that is what happened with this one. But, about a year later, it popped its head out from the crowded shelf and caught my eye and so it was time to finally watch it.
No Direction Home is a Martin Scorsese directed documentary about the life and career of Bob Dylan. And I can say that after having watched the film back all those years ago I felt like I knew a whole lot more about Dylan while at the same time still don't knowing him at all. And I think that is the point.
Read MoreWe are an audience that has seen it all. We know the conventions of genres and the way things generally play out from having been exposed to decades of films and film making. We are a generation that knows it and has no problem telling people that we know it. So, what do film makers do for audiences like that? Well, they show us that they know it also.
Read MoreFilms get lost in the shuffle for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there just isn't any publicity so no one even knows it exists. Sometimes the initial critical reviews are negative (right or wrong), and then there are films like Observe and Report.
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