In Blue Car, Agnes Bruckner plays Meg, a sensitive young high school girl who seems to excel in writing. And while the words on her page are calm, the world around her most certainly is not. Her father left the family many years ago, and her mother is self-involved and more than a little bit [...]
In Bubba Ho-tep, Elvis (yes, the real one) lives in a rest home, mostly resigned to stay in bed and let life pass him by. That is until he sees something creepy and notices that more seniors than usual are dying at the home. Fortunately, he’s not the only one who notices that something is [...]
There’s a famous little book called Hollywood Babylon, filled with pictures and stories about the Silent and Golden Age stars and their scandals. Written by cult filmmaker Kenneth Anger, it has become something of a legend within the film community with its gossipy writing and intriguing suggestions of all that is wrong in Hollywood.
One of [...]
Children Underground is one of the more depressing documentaries that you’ll ever see. When dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu banned contraception in the mid-sixties (in order to raise some kind of work force that would bring Romania from the brink of economic disaster), hundreds of thousands of children were left homeless on the street, or stuffed into [...]
You either like Nick Broomfield or you don’t. Like Michael Moore, he puts himself front and center in the documentary, wandering into frame and asking questions with a painful naïveté. For fans of 60 Minutes, this completely unprepared approach makes you bristle a little. It’s both Biggie and Tupac’s greatest asset and greatest failure.
Like his [...]
Bad Boys II finds Mike and Marcus returning as the two most destructive cops in the history of policedom. They’re trying to bust an international drug ring making its way through Miami – but mostly they’re busy blowing shit up and sticking their hands in corpses. I really wish I were kidding about that. Aided [...]
Yukio Mishima was a complicated and complex man, so a movie about his life would be equally interesting and complex. In the occupational sense, Mishima was a prolific writer who wrote novels, plays and poems. But he was also a man obsessed with art: making it and joining it to physical action. His desire to [...]
It’s apt that Peter Jackson set a blurb upon the advertising of the film. Jackson founded his now superstar film career upon exactly this kind of movie – funny, bloody rants with unique takes on horror and a never-ending supply of yucks. Frankly, and I mean no disrespect, an endorsement by Jackson nowadays is at [...]
Bus 174 is another movie about Brazilian street kids. Like City of God, it explores what happens when children are raised in an environment where they are forced to run free in the streets being violent. Even more specifically, the film is about one street kid who in a fit of madness or anger, tries [...]
Death to Smoochy is a dark satire about children’s television and the terrible hosts behind them. Because of his indiscretions Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams) is sacked from his lucrative television show and is soon replaced by Smoochy (Ed Norton). Needless to say, Rainbow will do whatever it takes to get to the top of the [...]