Owner: domeheid URL:http://domeheid.blogspot.com Join Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2006 17:29:05 -0500 Rating:1 Site Description: My life as a MacGuffin: something you've never seen before, and are never likely to want to see again. The Walter Mitty years; and in between, some film reviews. Site statistics:Click here
Breaking the Waves (1996) - ickleReview (DVD) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Cheery Lars von Trier movie...erm, maybe not. Emily Watson plays Bess McNeill, an innocent Scottish lassie living in an obscure island community with a very strict - is it Presbyterian? - church, which does not allow women to speak during the service or attend funerals. When she marries Jan (Stellan Skarsgard), she is still a virgin. She is emotionally deprived and cannot cope with the separation when Jan must return to work on the oil rig. She prays to God to bring him home. Perhaps she wishes she hadn't.Watson is outstanding as Bess. There is a scene where a light glistens in her eyes, making her look possessed by an angel. She looks so innocent and pure and has such a malleable face that a smile is only millimetres from a frown. The intertitles give the movie (and the audience) breathing space, appearing almost like paintings in a trompe l'oeil. Do not expect to be uplifted by this movie; although von Trier manages to find a strage beauty in its desolation. He tells a modern day v Read more:Breaking
, Waves
Bowling for Columbine (2002) - ickleReview (DVD) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Michael Moore's most assured documentary, about gun control (or the lack of) in America, in the wake of the Columbine
High School shootings of 20 April 1999. He investigates why it is that the gun-related homicide rate is so high in the States compared to the rest of the world, discovering that it is perhaps caused by the culture of fear that is perpetuated by the government and the mass media. (See Donnie Darko for a parallel theme of Love versus Fear.)Moore's film, three years in the making, and which won him an Oscar, demonstrates that activism can bring results. When he visits Wal-Mart headquarters with two of the victims of the Columbine shootings to show them the bullet wounds caused by merchandise bought at Wal-Mart stores, the PR department gets back to them the next day and announces that they will be withdrawing all lines of firearms ammunition withing 90 days. Moore goes on to visit Charlton Heston, the figurehead of the pro-gun National Rifle Association, at his home in B Read more:Bowling
A Bug's Life (1998) - ickleReview (TV) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Pixar animation about a colony of ants who live on an island, terrorized by grasshoppers, who demand they provide food for them. Flik (voiced by Dave Foley) is a clumsy, unpopular male ant who keeps messing things up. He is sent away for knocking over the huge stockpile of food the ants had prepared as an offering for the grasshoppers. Hopper (Kevin Spacey), the leader of the grasshoppers, orders the ants to gather twice as much food by the time the last leaf falls at the end of the summer. Flik ventures to the city to look for help and finds it in a rag-bag of failed circus performers, including a German catterpillar called Heimlich (Joe Ranft), a gender-conflicted ladybird called the suitably unisex name Francis (Denis Leary), and a stick insect called Slim (David Hyde Pierce), butt of many jokes e.g. slapstick after being slapped, who return to the ant colony with him to fight against the grasshoppers.Nugget: not the best Pixar movie. Roughly level with The Incredibles (2004) for la
Bullets Over Broadway (1994) - ickleReview (video)... 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Woody Allen comedy set in the 1920s. John Cusack plays David Shayne, a struggling playwright who sells out to the mob to produce his new play on Broadway
. The gangster financing the spiel, Nick Valenti (Joe Viterelli), insists that his flapper chorus girl, Olive (Jennifer Tilly), is given a part and is protected by her bodyguard, Cheech (Chazz Palminteri). Dianne Wiest is hilarious as the prima donna star actress Helen Sinclair, for whom David soon develops an infatuation as she has him entirely under the thumb. He begins to compromise his artistic integrity, even taking writing advice from Cheech, effectively rewriting the whole play. Jim Broadbent plays Warner Purcell, a talented but over-the-hill British actor with a compulsive eating habit whenever he gets nervous. There's barely a scene in which he's not eating.Brillig fun, this film, made with real affection for the jazz age of gin joints and chorus lines, mobsters and thesps. The best line is of course delivered by Dianne Wie Read more:Bullets
, video
The Bourne Identity (2002) - ickleReview (TV) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Superfast, supercool, supertinyplotflawrattlingaroundannoyingothercritics. Just watch the damn film, man; it's a good bit of harmless fun. Starring Matt Damon as a spy with not a lot of memory but a hell of a lot of processor, if you catch my drift: he gets things done. Fast. Ever get the feeling someone's out to get you? Yeah, be glad your name isn't (or might be if you could only just figure out what's happened to you) Jason Bourne
. I should have watched this a long time ago.Nugget: wham, bam, thank you ma'am.
Blow Out (1981) - ickleReview (video from TV) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Brian De Palma thriller starring John Travolta, who plays Jack Terry, a movie sound man who witnesses and records a car accident at night in which a wheel is shot and blown out (hence the title) and crashes off the road into the creek, killing the driver. Jack Terry dives in to save the other passenger. The driver turns out to be Governor McRyan, the presidential candidate; the other passenger, a girl called Sally, is a type of hooker/escort girl, whom the campaign team and police try to cover up to avoid embarrassing the governor's family. It turns out the "accident" was also caught on camera, so Jack Terry adds his sound to the film in an attempt to prove that it wasn't an accident, that the governor was murdered, to reveal the truth. He gets tangled up in a political conspiracy involving police corruption, endangering his own life and that of the girl, Sally, played by Nancy Allen.This is a very stylish film, with nods to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) in the comical slasher-movie ope Read more:video
Before Sunset (2004) - ickleReview (DVD) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The sequel to Before Sunrise (1995). Director Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy collaborate again, working more closely together on the script. In an on-the-set bonus feature of the DVD, Linklater calls them his fellow filmmakers. The two actors are also given full writing credits. An inspirational love story that magically avoids the Hollywood ::bleuch:: Moment.It's nine years later. Jesse (Hawke) has written a book about his one night in Vienna with Celine and is on a promotion tour of European cities, last stop: Paris. Continuing the James Joyce/Ulysses theme (the first movie was set on Bloomsday, 16 June: the day of Ulysses and the day Joyce first dated Nora Barnacle), Jesse is promoting his book in the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop, where Sylvia Beach first published Joyce's Ulysses. Jesse even says he spent the previous night in the loft above the store. Celine has read his book and, as she is a regular patron of the bookshop, is aware that Jesse will be in town. Just Read more:Sunset
Bend It Like Beckham (2002) - ickleReview (DVD) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Jess (Parminda Nagra) is a British Indian Sikh girl who is good at football and talks to the David Beckham
posters above her bed. One day, a white girl called Jules (Keira Knightley) sees her playing with the boys in the park and invites her to try out for her girls' team, Hounslow Harriers, coached by a young Irishman (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), who can't play himself because of a serious knee injury. The rather predictable feel-good plot probes almost every diversity issue you could think of: from inter-racial marriage, to homosexuality; to cultural hybridism and women's liberation. It's all good fun, and Nagra and Knightley provide some wonderful eye candy.The football action sequences are a little actorish and the plot arc more than a little familiar. I don't know if these films help to dispell stereotypes or merely reinforce them. Probably just a harmless evening's entertainment.Nugget: I've seen this movie so many times before, even though it was the first time I've seen it,
Bloom (2003) - ickleReview (DVD) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Film adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), one of the greatest novels ever written in any language. Having read the book twice and studied it over the past five years, it's difficult to give an objective view of Bloom
as a stand-alone film. I'm not sure if it would work for someone who knows nothing about the novel. Director Sean Walsh has certainly done a lot of creative cutting: entire chapters are omitted or condensed into a scene or two. From what I could make out, the most cinematic chapter of the novel, "Wandering Rocks" (chapter 10), which features an interpolative narrative technique similar to parallel editing, and the "Sirens" episode of the sing-song in the Ormond Hotel bar (chapter 11), were missing.The film begins at the end of the novel with Molly's monologue in bed with Bloom at the end of the day, and then comes full circle, like Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, returning back to where it started with Molly, and ending with her famous last words "yes I sai
Blow-Up (1966) - ickleReview (TV) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Film by Michelangelo Antonioni set in London, based on the short story Las babas del diablo by Julio Cortázar. A photographer (David Hemmings) inadvertently photographs a murder when he is taking pictures of a couple cavorting in a park. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) asks for the pictures back when she sees him, but he refuses. She tracks him back to his studio. He fobs her off with the wrong film and develops the right one after she has left. It is then when he is blowing up (enlarging - hence the title) the pictures that he notices a gun and a corpse in the bushes.There are early scenes of him shooting models in the studio. He treats some of them quite harshly. He is over-exposed to beautiful women and doesn't treat them with much respect. Yet the women are desperate to be photographed by him and use their bodies as lures; but because he sees so many beautiful women, he is hard to impress. When he does let a couple of groupies in, there follows a number of artful but nevertheless g
Amores perros (2000) - ickleReview (cinema) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Debut feature by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who went on to make 21 Grams (2003). This film about dog owners, set in Mexico City (and hence in Spanish with English subtitles),is indebted in some respects to Quentin Tarantino in its structure of three interrelated stories told out of chronological order, which collide - in more ways than one - in a car crash at the beginning of the film, which recalls the crash scene in Pulp Fiction (1994) when Butch (Bruce Willis) runs over Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames).Octavio (Gael GarcÃa aka Gael GarcÃa Bernal) and his buddy are being chased in a car when the film opens. A body is bleeding on the back seat. Only later do we realize it is a fierce fighting dog called Cofi. In their attempts to escape their pursuers, they crash side-on into a car at a crossroads.Octavio, we later learn, as the film goes back in time, has an infatuation with his sister-in-law, who has fallen pregnant for the second time and is afraid to tell her husban Read more:Amores
, perros
Moonlight Mile (2002) - ickleReview (DVD) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Perfectly formed minor masterpiece by writer/director Brad Silberling that was ravaged by the critics when it first came out. It's best not to know anything about this film, just watch it and let it grab you. Strong cast on top form with Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, newcomer Ellen Pompeo and Holly Hunter.Nugget: bravely drawn-out exposition keeps you learning about the characters throughout the film.Read the full review on FilmExposed. Read more:Moonlight
37 Uses for a Dead Sheep (2006) - ickleReview (cin... 1970-01-01 00:59:59 BBC4 Storyville and ARTE France documentary about the Pamir Kirghiz tribe of central Asia, who migrated from Russia to China, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the twentieth century before settling in eastern Turkey in 1982. The filmmakers collaborate closely with the Kirghiz community who re-enact seminal moments from their history in a patchwork of film stocks made to look like newsreels and early Soviet films.Nugget: amateurish in the pejorative and positive senses it approximates the essence of a people without the patronizing tendency of anthropoligical studies.Read the full review on FilmExposed. Read more:Sheep
Red Road (2006) - ickleReview (cinema) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Set in a scabby part of Glasgow, the Red Road of the title refers to a towerblock housing estate where much of the action takes place. Jackie (Kate Dickie) works in a CCTV control room, reporting crimes and keeping track of her favourite citizens, including a dancing late-night cleaning lady and a man with an incontinent dog. One night she spots a face she recognizes, one she wasn't expecting to see. Clyde (Tony Curran) has been released early from prison. Jackie begins to stalk him, but it is unclear how she knows him, what the nature of his crime was, and why she is putting herself in such danger. Martin Compston (who brilliantly debuted in Sweet Sixteen (2002)) is a schemie friend of Clyde's called Stevie, a role he plays particularly well.The plot unravels slowly. We are never sure until the end about what went on before and how the characters are related to each other. It's creatively shot, much of it from what appears to be real CCTV cameras. They are intrusive, but the way Ja
The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006) - ickleReview (cin... 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Highly polished documentary about Lennon
.htm">John Lennon
's life in America from 1966-76 at the height of his involvement in the anti-war movement.Nugget: contains some rare footage from the Lennon archives and a soundtrack almost entirely of Lennon's songs.Read the full review on FilmExposed.
Books to read after Finals 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Currently reading Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins; Roman Krznaric, The First Beautiful Game: Stories of Obsession in Real TennisOkay, so my Finals finished in May 2004, but I doubt I'll ever get to the end of this list as I keep adding to it. Here's its current state of play. Many of these items already appear on my Amazon Wishlist, if I haven't bought them already in waiting. Instead of deleting items I've read, from now on I'll cross them out and add them to my list of books I've read:Ian Halperin, Fire and Rain: The James Taylor Story (biography)Gustav Flaubert, Madame BovaryJulian Barnes, Flaubert's ParrotSusan Orlean, The Orchid ThiefA. M. Homes (American writer compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald)Ernest HemingwaySalman Rushdie, Midnight's Children; The Moor's Last SighJoseph Heller, Catch-22Adolf Hitler, Mein KampfKarl Marx, The Communist ManifestoJean-Paul Sartre, NauseaTim Woods, Beginning PostmodernismJohn Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice am Read more:Books
Match Point (2005) - ickleReview (DVD) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 On a second viewing Woody Allen's first London film is still enjoyable yet uneven. Jonathan Rhys Meyers acts some of his scenes astutely, creating an awkwardness, an unease, believably manipulating his girlfriend Chloe (Emily Mortimer)'s plans for the evening to get his own way or cringeworthily denying he'd been spotted in town by a friend of his brother-in-law's. In other scenes he is dreadfully wooden, delivering his lines plain wrong - no one speaks like that! The fault may be with Allen for choosing the wrong cut or simply not being able to get the right delivery from his actors.Scarlett Johansson is breath-takingly sexy and voluptuous as the failing American actress Nola Rice. Allen really cast and wrote for her well. He has turned her into a fantasy woman and yet, within the same film, made her disgusting. It's brilliant the way Chris (Rhys Meyers)'s two women fluctuate in his affections.Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton are perfect as parents-in-law.Still worth seeing despite Read more:Match
Brokeback Mountain (2005) - ickleReview (cinema) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Ang Lee film set in 1963 initially but spanning twenty years in the lives of two Wyoming shepherds who have a homosexual love for one another frustrated by their own fears of how society will react towards them.Heath Ledger plays the more reticent of the two men, Ennis Del Mar. He was brought up by his brother and sister and has had quite a hard life. Jake Gyllenhaal is the more forthright Jack Twist, who initiates the physical relationship between them. After their initial summer together spent up on BrokebackMountain
guarding thousands of sheep from the wolves (is there a metaphor there, I wonder?), they don't see each other for four years, by which time they are both married (to Dawson's buddy Michelle Williams and The Princess Diaries' Anne Hathaway - not, incidentally, Shakespeare's wife, who I believe died some time ago). They claim to be old fishing buddies and swanny off to the mountains two or three times a year for the next twenty years. Ennis doesn't have the courage t Read more:Brokeback Mountain
The Good Girl (2002) - ickleReview (DVD) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The Good Girl doesn't know who her daddy is. Bastard offspring of One Hour Photo (2002), Fargo (1996) and Gigli (2003). Starring Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gyllenhaal, the real strength comes from the supporting cast, who provide most of the humour to off-set the semi-tragic love story between frustrated wife (Aniston) and intense writer-type (Gyllenhaal).Nugget: this certainly wasn't the run-of-the-mill date movie the packaging led me to expect, but it wasn't quite successful in the generic detours it decided to take.Read the full review on FilmExposed.
The History Boys (2006) - ickleReview (cinema) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In 2004 Alan Bennett's play The History
Boys was a huge success at the National Theatre on London's South Bank. Its run was extended to meet audience demand and it toured with similar popularity in New York and Sydney, receiving numerous awards. This film crystallizes those immaculate performances, preserving them on celluloid for future generations, who would never be able to see the same cast performing the play. Already the boys were becoming young men. This film came before it was too late. It's so rare that the entire cast and the director (Nicholas Hytner) are able to carry on over into the film adaptation of a play.Set in a Yorkshire grammar school in the early 1980s, The History Boys is about a class of exceptionally smart boys who return to school for one final term after their A-Levels to prepare for Oxbridge entrance exams. The school does not have a tradition of sending candidates to these two most prestigious universities, so the headmaster (Clive Merrison) hires a youn
Books I have read 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Here is a list of books I have read recently. Each time I finish a book, I'll add it to the list.* denotes a book read (either whole or in part) while turning the vicar's bike around.October 20068) Patrick Dunleavy, Authoring a PhD: How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Thesis or Dissertation7) Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast *September 20066) Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon5) James Joyce, ExilesAugust 20064) Tom Stoppard, Rock 'n' Roll *3) Tobias Wolff, Old SchoolJuly 20062) Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare & Company *June 20061) Mays 14See also books to read. Read more:Books
Handkerchief Drill (1949) - ickleReview (cinema) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Amusing one-minute short public information film produced by the British government's Ministry of Health to encourage its citizens to use handkerchiefs when sneezing. In the style of Mr Cholmondley-Warner. This black and white film has recently been restored by the BFI and is being screened before performances of The History Boys.Nugget: surely this sort of thing was made with tongue inserted firmly in cheek. Read more:Drill
Bug Juice - episode 6 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Hurray! Another episode of Bug Juice
has appeared. Please, sir, I want some more.Adblock
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