Another week, another four-star Philip Seymour Hoffman movie. It was only a month or so ago I was completely floored by Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, an exhilarating entertainment about a jewelry robbery that goes wrong. Hoffman plays the worst of two brothers, a man who’s high level of greed ultimately gets the best of him. He is great fun to watch in the film, almost scary at times. And now, in The Savages, which premiered at Sundance last January, he plays a much more dopey but equally fascinating character, in a film that may be even better than Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. This is a fascinating character study, with not one but two of the year’s best performances, one by Hoffman, and one by the incomparable Laura Linney.

Hoffman and Linney play brother and sister (see the resemblance)? He, Jon, is a writer and teacher, and she, Wendy, is struggling to get a grant for her playwriting. They’re both busy with their own lives, never keeping in touch that often. They both, however, need to meet up when she gets a call about their father, who seems to be losing his marbles at his home in Arizona. They meet with him and discover he is living with (more…)

Hallelujah! Just when I thought I was going to get through 2007 without seeing a single excellent horror film, a superb movie like The Mist jumps out of nowhere and grabs me by the throat. This is not a non-stop frightfest or an action-packed thriller. Instead, it’s an eerie exercise in suspense that builds and builds for its first hour and actually gets better as it goes along, leading toward a handful of gruesome and memorable scenes, all the way to its jaw-dropping, ironic, and surprisingly downbeat finale. This is the first great horror movie based on a Stephen King story in seventeen years, and that sure is saying something!

The set-up is classic Stephen King. David (The Punisher’s Thomas Jane) and his son go into town to buy some groceries on a day that started off with odd weather. First, a seemingly heavy wind has blown down his trees, one slamming into the front of his house, and second, a thick mist has started to cover part of the lake. Impossible, right? David’s not sure. In line at the grocery store, the mist resurfaces (more…)

I have vague recollections of seeing Walt Disney’s first feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in theatres when I was a little kid. Upon looking at IMDB’s release dates stats, I noticed that this film was re-released in both 1987 and 1993. It was probably the 1993 version I saw. This would’ve been after The Little Mermaid. After Beauty and the Beast. After Aladdin. What did I think of the movie that day in 1993, my hair in a bowl cut, my shirt hanging over my flabby belly, my long sweats covering up any sign of a pair of shoes. Did I even like this movie? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs must have made a huge impression on audiences in 1937, and it has influenced so much in animation that it’s unfair, at all really, to criticize this movie. Upon watching this film again, however, especially after watching other Disney classics from the 40’s and 50’s, I wasn’t head over heels in love with it. It’s a wonderful movie, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nowhere near perfect.

The magic of the movie is in its visual look. It’s been seventy years since the release of this movie, and it still looks fabulous. I have the 2000 2-Disc out-of-print DVD, which has all sorts of great bonus features (including a mine cart game and Angela Lansbury guiding us through the DVD!). Every little nook and cranny of the frame has great care taken to it, whether it be the (more…)

Twenty minutes. That’s about how long it took me into this film when I saw it years ago that I knew that Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, written and directed by John Hughes, was going to be one of my all-time favorite movies. The best comedies are funny, yes, but also have a lot of heart, and there is no shortage of either in this film. This is not one of the best movies ever made. It’s not even a movie that may be loved by everyone. But it’s a film that has touched me every time I watch it, and most of the credit goes to the strong writing and the superlative performances by Steve Martin and John Candy. Like John Carpenter’s Halloween, this film is seasonal, given that the whole movie revolves around Thanksgiving (a holiday not typically the backdrop in too many films). This Thanksgiving marks the 20th anniversary of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and I thought it was time to really give this special film its due (more…)

ADDICTION CONTROL

It’s taken me over thirteen years, but I’ve finally made a film that deals with an obsession of mine that truly will never die. The film stars Scott Gairdner and Ryan Mitchell, and is 4 minutes in length. I hope you all enjoy it!

Oh boy, the Universal Horror Monster movie sequels. One of the earliest forms in the film business of a studio making a quick buck has to be these movies. With the exception of Bride of Frankenstein, most of these films are mostly without merit, except for some fleeting entertainment value. Frankenstein. Dracula. The Wolf Man. The Invisible Man. The Mummy. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The originals are always exceptional, and then they are typically followed by sub-par movies that consist of titles like The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Invisible Woman, and The Mummy’s Hand (not to mention The Mummy’s Tomb!). These is a cheesy quality to these sequels than can sometimes make for an entertaining movie, but they’re typically stupid, and sometimes boring. Dracula’s Daughter surprised me in that it was actually a pretty worthy follow-up to the 1931 picture Dracula, a movie that didn’t really hold up for me, and I at times found myself even more entertained in this than in the original, although the story here is often pretty tired. When Bride of Frankenstein is energetic and exciting, Dracula’s Daughter is formulaic and familiar. That’s not to say that it’s not without it’s fun.

Just like Bride of Frankenstein, the 5-years-in-the-making Dracula’s Daughter picks up right after the original left off, with Van Helsing being discovered right at the site (more…)

This was meant to just be a favor to a friend. I didn’t actually expect to really like this movie. My friend Katie is obsessed with a certain someone with the initials of JP (and we’re not talking Joe Pantoliano), and we’ve been trying to find time in the last five weeks to go out and see his two movies We Own the Night and Reservation Road. I was more interested in Reservation Road because of its family-in-crisis storyline and director, who made the terrific Hotel Rwanda in 2004. We Own the Night looked a little banal, but I still wanted to give it a chance when Katie and I finally went and saw it yesterday, its very last day at the Landmark Theatres. While it’s not a great film, We Own the Night is involving and very entertaining, with some terrific moments. And it features an astounding performance by, yes, that JP guy.

The film has a pretty solid premise, involving two brothers, each living in his own world. Joaquin Phoenix is Bobby, a nighclub manager, and Mark Wahlberg is Joseph, a New York City cop. They are not the closest of brothers, but their lives become entangled when (more…)

Well, the AFI Film Festival is officially over, and I must say I had a great time. I wasn’t able to get out to too many films, but here’s a run-down on the seven films I saw over the course of the week…

Southland Tales. Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko proved to be highly entertaining but strangely disappointing. ** (out of ****) See full review.

Sigur Ros: Heima. This is a beautiful, hypnotic music documentary and a real treat for Sigur Ros fans. The movie chronicles the end of Sigur Ros’ world tour that ends in Iceland, where we are treated to different performances from the band. Cutting between the performances, interviews with all the members of the band, and various shots of gorgeous Iceland, the film can almost work as a relaxation exercise. I just became a Sigur Ros fan about a year ago after first hearing their work, and I’ve since used their music in two of my own films. Their music makes for great inspiration, especially in a visual sense, and the director Dean DeBlois uses the great material he has to cut together a movie that is as informative as it is beautiful. ***1/2

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. Winner of the Palme D’Or at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, this well-made but difficult-to-watch movie (more…)

Nicole Kidman can’t catch a break. Ever since her Oscar-winning turn in The Hours five years ago, she’s been in one disappointment after another. It’s heart-breaking because I like her a lot and want her to be in a great movie again. Her stand-out movies of the last decade (plus a couple years) include Moulin Rouge, To Die For, and Eyes Wide Shut, with The Others and The Hours not far behind. Cold Mountain, released in 2003, was a decent movie, but she followed that up with The Stepford Wives (awful), Birth (weird), The Interpreter (didn’t see it), Bewitched (really really didn’t want to see it), and Fur (critically panned). This year she has three films. The Invasion came and went last August without anyone blinking, The Golden Compass (which looks questionable) opens in December, and now there’s Margot at the Wedding, opening November 21 in limited release.

I thought Margot at the Wedding could be the movie to finally lift her out of this funk, mostly due to the fact that it’s directed by Noah Baumbach, who made the near-perfect, absolutely wonderful 2005 comedy The Squid and the Whale (more…)

I’ve never gone back and forth on how I felt about a movie than I have on Southland Tales. It’s been over a week since I’ve seen it, I still can’t get it out of my head, and I still don’t know exactly how I feel about it. My first instinct was to give this a favorable review (although not an excited one), given that even though this is one of the most flawed movie in the history of the cinema, I actually enjoyed myself pretty thoroughly for the majority of the running time. But then just minutes after I saw it, I realized just how terrible the movie was, and for days I thought about giving the film a really negative review, given that I never actually cared at any moment during the movie what was happening and why. But this movie is far too entertaining to just vomit all over it. I’ve decided that I’m mixed, completely mixed, about how I feel about this film. I’m not going to tell you to avoid it, and I’m not going to tell you to see it. This movie’s as tricky as they come.

Next I could try to sum up the plot of the movie, which is literally impossible. If someone were holding a gun to my head right now, forcing me to write a paragraph about what this movie is about, my brains would be splattered on the floor in a mere two seconds (more…)