SIFF Review – Yellow Sea

Posted in Uncategorized by - Jun 14, 2011
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So. Much. Blood.

I love gangster movies. Let us not pussyfoot. I love movies where nefarious things are afoot and we’re following the bad guys. I root for the crooks.I love it when a plan comes together.

Yellow Sea is a pretty damn fine gangster flick. It’s ultra-violent, which is popular in modern Korean cinema, and the violence is kept disconcertingly realistic. There are just about no guns in this movie – it’s all chef’s knives, hatchets and baseball bats. Well, once it’s a giant soup bone, but generally it’s knives, hatchets and bats. If you are delicate of constitution, this might …

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Quick Review – Attack the Block

Posted in movies by - Jun 08, 2011
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This movie is pure, undiluted nerd joy.

It’s the story of an alien invasion, so points there. It happens in the dicey urban environment of a low-income Estate in South London, full of tough, dim-witted hooligans with nearly impenetrable Brixton accents and slang. More points. Nick Frost is in it, and there’s tons of gore and unexpected laughter. So many points.

It’s no easy trick to make a movie that is both frightening and funny. It’s an even more impressive feat to make a movie that makes a gentle social point without ever feeling preachy or hamfisted. This movie does both, and …

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SIFF Review – Project Nim

Posted in Uncategorized by - Jun 08, 2011
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This movie will probably break your heart.

The basic synopsis is as follows. In the 70s, a Columbia linguistics professor with a douchey combover decides he wants to get in on the craze of teaching non-human primates sign language. Disinterested in doing the actual work himself, he acquires a 2-week old chimp and farms the duties out to a former student and paramour. She is asked to raise the chimp as if it were just another child in her Upper West Side brownstone. In time, the professor chooses another student/paramour to head up the experiment and wrenches the chimp from …

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SIFF Review – Bobby Fischer Against the World

Posted in Uncategorized by - Jun 08, 2011
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Bobby Fischer’s big moment happened when I was 2, so the greatest revelation of this documentary for me is that once upon a time even Americans had the attention span and intellectual ambition to go crazy for chess. Seeing such a static and sleepy game got top billing on Wide World of Sports was surreal. The closest analog I can think of is the poker boomlet of the early aughts, and Texas Hold ‘Em doesn’t exactly compete with the Game of Kings in the intellectual rigor department.

The movie relies heavily on interviews with people who were present at the …

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SIFF Review – Submarine

Posted in movies by - May 26, 2011
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At this point, making coming-of-age films about misunderstood high-school loners with amusing haircuts is all downside. We’ve all seen eleventy million movies like that. Precious soundtrack full of proto-emo bands so underground the members haven’t even met yet, slangy dialog so hip that you’ll never hear it on the lips of an actual person. I’m getting a little surly just thinking about it.

Fortunately, this is not that. I mean, it most certainly could have been. All the elements are there. Ineffectual, shoegazing hero who longs to lose his virginity with a girl too cool for him, check. Crazy, embarrassing homelife …

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SIFF Review – The Ward

Posted in movies by - May 23, 2011
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My parents gave me a bunch of passes to SIFF for the birthday, so this year I’m gonna really try to make sure I see a bunch of movies. If you are reading this, that means you get the privilege of hearing me comment on movies that you may never hear about again. I might also see the next mega-hit cineplex-destroyer, but the smart money is on poignant coming-of-age tales from Portugal and Japanese robot-geishap-assassin movies.

First up was ‘The Ward’, the first feature in about a decade from John Carpenter.

My feelings about John Carpenter are complex. He made …

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Quick Review – Bridesmaids

Posted in Uncategorized by - May 21, 2011
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The buzz around this movie was that it was the litmus test to see if Americans wanted to watch a funny movie full of ladies. There were a lot of stories about how if ‘Bridesmaids’ didn’t rule the box office, woman-centered comedy would be over. Forever.

As stupid as that buzz was, it was probably a little true. If ‘Bridesmaids’ failed, it would probably have been used as a reason not to finance similar movies. Fortunately for filmed comedy, it’s making decent coin. The disaster has been momentarily averted.

I don’t know what people were wringing their hands about. Kristen Wiig is …

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Quick Review – Everything Must Go

Posted in Uncategorized by - May 21, 2011
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They say that rock stars all want to be movie stars, and vice versa. There’s a sort of inevitable desire of people with a niche success to prove that they aren’t defined by their expertise – that they could have been just as successful in any number of other endeavors. This insecurity is responsible for a lot of bad movies and Billy Bob Thornton records.

In a similar vein, indie movie producers are always chasing studio levels of success and movie studios are always looking to get some indie cred. In both cases, I humbly suggest that there are some …

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Quick Review: Priest

Posted in life after cable by - May 19, 2011
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‘Priest’ is a dystopian vampire Western with warrior priests and giant motorcycles, and yet somehow it remains stupefyingly dull. Seems impossible, but there it is. I saw it for free and I still felt sort of robbed.

I can imagine that at some point in the development process this looked like a fun ‘B’ movie that might do well in the lull before blockbuster season. It’s certainly laced with almost every kind of fanboy bait. The warrior priests have giant face tattoos and are always jetting about on giant light-cycley dust-raisers trying to deal with the threat of quadrupedal vampires. They …

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Posted in Uncategorized by - May 09, 2011
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