This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
The Ring wasn’t scary, there was no suspense, and it wasn’t thrilling. There was nothing. You can’t just throw a bunch of weird things together with Naomi Watts and out pops a horror/thriller…or whatever this movie was supposed to be. I call it dull and boring. (zing!)
[Warning: potential spoilers…] Well, heck. All that fooferall about the first two Matrix films and the philosophy involved and the whole Internet talking about it and how hard the Warshawski brothers worked to build this philosophical structure and they waste it all and make the last film a straight-out action flick with a love story and a bit of a twist at the end. Not that the movie is bad, it was actually pretty entertaining because they dispensed with all that stuff…but I have to wonder why they put so much emphasis on it to begin with. What did you think?
What struck me most about this film was not how mature and immature the girls were but how, as I said on the way out of the theatre, “our country is failing us in so many ways”. A description of the film from the web site:
[The film] tells two coming-of-age stories from the real America: Shanae, ten years old when she was gang-raped by five boys, responded by drinking and drugging, and then graduated to murder, with the stabbing death of a friend, at age 11. Megan, whose mother abandoned her to turn tricks to support her ravaging heroin addiction, ran away from ten different foster homes before being arrested for attacking another foster child with a box cutter. Both girls ended up in the Waxter Juvenile Facility, home to Maryland’s most violent juvenile offenders. It is here that their journeys really begin.
I’m not sure how wide of a release this film is getting, but if you get a chance to see it, I’d recommend it.
This film answers the question, “what if you took a guy who grew up watching kung-fu films and gave him $60 million to make his own kung-fu film?”
This isn’t the most interesting or insightful documentary I’ve seen, but comedians can’t help being funny.
Maggie Gyllenhaal talks about her role in Secretary with Nerve in an interview called Spanking the Flunky.
Jackie Chan’s schtick — along with the man himself — is getting old. I wanted to like this movie, but even Owen Wilson’s presence, which actually made the movie worse, couldn’t help it.
I have a theory about this movie. Every time I tell my theory to someone, they cough uncomfortably and roll their eyes as soon as they’re out of my sight. Well, Greg didn’t, but I don’t know him well enough to discern if he was just humoring me or not.
Anyway.
My theory is that Ocean’s Eleven is the best Hollywood blockbuster movie produced in years and that all Hollywood blockbusters should follow in its footsteps. Most Hollywood films try too hard (We’re supposed to care about the romance between Liv Tyler and Affleck in Armageddon? Bring on the asteroid!) or hit the audience over the head with cheap humor or heavy metaphor (Seabiscuit was particularly heavy-handed) or have absolutely no style at all. Ocean’s Eleven is a reasonably smart movie (it’s not cerebral, but it doesn’t pander either), entertaining, and thanks to Soderbergh’s direction and a good soundtrack, it’s got great style too. And it never resorts to sex or violence to score cheap points with the audience. (I could go on and on…)
Best film I’ve seen in the theatre in ages. Bill Murray is a comedic genius; the scene with the elliptical trainer had my eyes watering and my pants wetting.
There’s nothing wrong with this movie. Robin Williams was good and they didn’t do the typical serial killer thing with it. But the film as a whole seemed empty, forgettable, and bland.
Wes Anderson’s first film isn’t as polished and elaborate as Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums, and that’s a good thing. It would be nice to see Anderson do another stripped-down film like Bottle Rocket. Caw-caw!
Forget for a moment that this is just another Adam Sandler movie where he plays a dorky guy who gets angry at inappropriate moments and smashes things. Actually, scratch that…Sandler’s pretty good at playing that part by now and it’s nothing for him to be ashamed of. After seeing the movie, the first question out of your mouth may have been, “what the hell was that?” A: a musical.
Somehow this 90-minute film isn’t just about the National Spelling Bee and eight of its contestants, it also manages to fit in a great deal about what it means to be an American. Being from the Midwest, I identified most with the boy from Missouri and the girl from Texas. They were smart kids and naturally talented spellers but had no chance against big-city kids from the coasts whose parents could afford French tutors, spelling coaches, and computers with spelling software.
Jennifer Aniston’s acting ability keeps thwarting my attempts at disliking her. The only drawback here is Jake Gyllenhaal’s character; he needed to be a little less crazy. If he was that insane, he never would have made it to this point in his life without offing himself.
If you’d asked me six months ago if I wanted to go see a Disney movie based on a Disneyland attraction, I probably would have punched you in the face. But Pirates is as good as you’ve heard it is. Depp gives a great performance as Jack Sparrow (I knew I’d love the film when Depp steps off the crow’s nest of his sinking ship right onto the dock), and Keira Knightly, well, let’s just say I’ve got a bit of a thing for her.
I’m such a sucker for slo-mo, especially when Wes Anderson does it. Gets me every time. That scene where Margo gets off the bus to pick up Baumer at the dock? I could watch that scene over and over and over again.
While this movie needed more topless women in pools of K-Y Jelly and Will Ferrell on the screen, it was still a pretty funny update of Animal House.
Pumping Iron reveals Arnold Schwarzenegger to be unusually suited for a career in politics…which makes for a fascinating documentary and which should scare the hell out of everyone currently living in California.
This movie could have been great, but it’s just average. Skip to the end to see the Nazi figure skating thing. Now that’s comedy gold!
T3 was better than any movie made specifically for paying Arnold Schwarzenegger a lot of money has a right to be. And Claire Danes was in it, so that’s good as well.
The story of Hollywood mogul Robert Evans is reason enough to tune into this film, but the on-the-cheap special effects are notable as well. The primary effect — building on Ken Burns’ technique of panning and zooming across photographs to create the illusion of motion — separates the subjects of photos from the backgrounds and then panning each at different speeds, creating a remarkably alive 3-D “scene”, almost like Bullet-Time from the Matrix, only with photos.
Pretty good, but a little heavy-handed in spots. Can Hollywood make a “serious” film without being heavy-handed?
Also, before the show, Mark bounded up to the folks waiting in the front of the line to get into the theatre and said, “are you guys as excited as we are to see Seabiscuit?” Instead of the proper response of laughing nervously, one of the guys yelled, “yeah!” We then laughed nervously.
A beautiful study of life and of earth by way of some birds. The cinematography in this film is amazing.
Skip this one and watch Requiem for a Dream instead…Spun just ripped off all of Aronofsky’s camera techniques. I should have known not to go see something with Brittney Murphy in it. It was good to see Jason Schwartzman in a movie again, but would have preferred seeing him in something better.
Pixar has found what Disney lost in the early 90s…the something that makes animated movies actually watchable. I think it may have something to do with the lack of singing. IMO, as soon as Pixar gets rid of Disney as the distributor of their films, the sooner they’ll start pumping out even better movies.
Guest’s latest mockumentary is probably the strongest film of the bunch that includes Best in Show, This is Spinal Tap, and Waiting for Guffman. A Mighty Wind tells the tale of a folk singers reunion show and is funny, genuinely touching in parts (the Mitch and Mickey storyline), and features some great original music (and I’m not a big folk music fan). However, Guest’s mockumentary format is beginning to wear a little thin for me; I would have liked it a lot more had I not seen the others first.
Socials & More