It is not the easiest thing in the world to find a film that compares to that 1964 masterpiece "Woman in the Dunes," the one about surviving in an ever-enclosing space. This underrated 21st century French film with the overly generic title nevertheless has me seeing fascinating correlations.
A happy bohemian family has lived off of an incomplete highway for years, only for public road construction to begin again and thus spoil their living space; really, it's a structural public…
One of the weirdest movies ever made, right up there with “Last Year at Marienbad” and “Eraserhead.” I was free to reflect during Enter the Void with its psychedelic style and free-association form (disclaimer: the subjective first-person POV placement will alienate some viewers). I loved this Noé film, my favorite of his, because nothing has ever been done like it before and it sung to me. Most movies crowd and close you in with trivial dialogue and arbitrary plot stuffing.…
If you turn on a bunch of gravely serious Oscar-bait movies in a row, the mind might crave something junky but entertaining. Something like the cheesy baseball comedy Major League will do. The editing is often choppy and the visual compositions can be TV-level, but sometimes you’re not supposed to care about such things. For plot: A widower and ex-showgirl inherits the Cleveland Indians and her intention is to sink the team with a roster of misfits; if attendance drops…
I don’t think Harry (Billy Crystal) is coming onto Sally (Meg Ryan) in the early scenes of When Harry Met Sally when he says to her, “Empirically, you are attractive.” She is revolted, I say it’s just a compliment. He apologizes for what it is. You can’t take it back, Sally says, it’s already out there. They’re sharing a car trip, but he says they cannot be friends. The explanation is that the sex part always gets in the way.…
“In Australia when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the Walkabout. This is the story of a Walkabout.” – Prologue
The greatest film ever made. Walkabout features two city children lost in the Outback, luckily saved by an Aborigine boy who is on his yearlong…
In 2011, I thought Contagion was very good but had far-fetched question marks only because I didn’t understand then the credibility of an airborne virus, microbes and pathogens, incubation periods, and generally the science of it all which happens to be based on actual science. I had looked at it as a “thriller.” I saw it again this week, and it predicted a lot of things right or to come, and while the science has certain variables compared to contemporary…
