Couch Report

Fri 16 Apr 200412:52 AM

Having recently gotten through a huge project at Behavior, I’m finally getting some evenings and weekends back. Some of that time is spent hanging out and some of it watching movies; I’ve definitely missed being able to watch movies with frequency, and in the past two weeks I’ve finally been able to squeeze in a good number of them. Here are some quick thoughts on some of them.

Hell on Reels

Wed 7 Apr 200401:19 AM

Most of the people with whom I’ve casually discussed “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” have insisted that I should put aside my prejudices — specifically my unwillingness to get suckered into another attempt at reinventing Jim Carrey’s heretofore painfully unwatchable career, first, and my aversion to watching yet another ridiculously hip music video director’s transition to the silver screen, second — so as not to miss one of the brighter offerings in this year’s crop of movies. “I was skeptical too, believe me, but it was really good,” said one of my friends last week. I just can’t do it, or at least I haven’t been able to yet, and if I do, I’m pretty sure I won’t be writing about it here unless I find it sufficiently unworthy of all the praise it’s got. Something stubborn in me finds the whole enterprise just too plainly offensive.

The Sum of Its Parts

Mon 15 Mar 200411:50 PM

If you have a penchant for stilted, muscular dialogue illustrating the passionless relationships between men steeped in their work, then you’ll probably get a big kick out of David Mamet’s latest exercise in elaborate, procedural sleight of hand. It’s called “Spartan,” and what it boils down to is basically a Tom Clancy plot adapted with Mamet’s signature dialogue style and his almost goofy obsession with charade.

News Flashes

Fri 12 Mar 200412:42 AM

The most consistently funny program on television is “The Daily Show with John Stewart.” For some proof, have a look at “Hail the Armies of Rove” on this page. It’s a gut-busting bit of reportage from Stephen Colbert and serves as just one example of this cast member’s remarkable comedic genius. So I was eagerly anticipating tonight’s showing of “These Just In,” which features a series of four short films from a few of the show’s staff writers. To be honest, I was mildly disappointed, as their overall hilarity was noticeably milder than just about any episode of the show they produce at their day jobs.

A Very Long Fairy Tale

Tue 13 Jan 200412:52 AM

If it weren’t the beginning of another crazy week at Behavior (where we’re looking to hire freelance designers, by the way), I’d spend some time writing extensive praise for Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” I watched it for the first time this past weekend on a newly minted DVD version, and it was magnificent. Perhaps a very brief outlining of my thoughts are in order anyway because, at heart, this is a ninety minute film stretched out to a very long two hours and forty-odd minutes.

House of Acting

Tue 6 Jan 200412:34 PM

Vadim Perelman’s “House of Sand and Fog” begins with the very end of its story, a narrative device that has become so popular in recent cinema that it provoked in me a feeling of dread. The idea of enduring yet another movie that spends the bulk of its time in flashback has by now a tired, depleted promise to it, and I was seized, in the opening sixty seconds, with a sense that I was embarking on 126 minutes of bad cinema. And in fact, there is a good deal of this movie adaptation of Andrew Dubus III’s novel that is perfunctory and predicated on only unambitious attempts at storytelling, from its cast of not quite fleshed out supporting characters to its sometimes implausible leaps in narrative logic.

A Night on the Tiles

Thu 1 Jan 200411:32 PM

Burn Baby Burn

Mon 22 Dec 200303:24 PM

The so-called “SuperDrive” in my new 12″ PowerBook G4, while not the first DVD-RW I’ve ever had access to, is the first one I’ve personally owned. So, with a little bit of free time this past weekend, I decided to sit down and see if it was possible to burn myself a copy of one of the movies that I own in DVD format — for fair use, back-up purposes only, of course.

Long Haul in Middle Earth

Thu 18 Dec 200311:29 AM

For fans who don’t want the J.R.R. Tolkien “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to ever come to an end, director Peter Jackson has apparently done his very best to fulfill that wish with his interminable, ass-numbing, bladder-busting “Return of the King.” It clocks in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred hours and goes to great pains to bring satisfying resolutions to nearly every one of the bakers’s dozen of protagonists and almost all eight billion of the supporting characters in this epic tale of short people and cloak-lovers.