It’s been a while, eh? It all started out downhill for Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese’s film about an insomniac paramedic suffering through an existential crisis, starring Nicolas Cage, and written by Paul Schrader. It was Schrader’s involvement that seemed to doom it from the very get go, leaving it wide open to...
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Justin has the Official All-Knowing Top Ten List covered in print this week (even though any list without Hugo nestled snugly into the top spot is clearly very wrongheaded and misguided), so I thought I’d take a different look at 2011 and run with the Underrated theme. It’s kind of a useless theme in...
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Thanksgiving has to be the most forgotten holiday in film history. Rightly so, in my opinion. Still, while plenty of movies have Thanksgiving scenes in them, very few are actually about Thanksgiving. Television might actually have the best track record for Turkey Day. Roseanne used to do good thanksgiving episodes, especially the episode “Angstgiving”,...
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I’m an absolute sucker for a good stalker comedy. Whether it be Amelie, Punch Drunk Love or Hana and Alice, there is just something so wonderfully off about them that it makes me happy. Just knowing that the stalkers are harmless and generally good-natured takes entirely all of the creepiness out of what, in...
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One could attempt to describe Katsuhito Ishii’s The Taste of Tea, but one would fail at doing so. Modest and understated, yet with much depth of spirit, it’s the kind of live action film that only an animator could direct, and, really, only a Japanese animator could direct. It is the story of a family,...
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Out of Billy Wilder’s entire filmography, Kiss Me, Stupid is the one that really stuck in his craw. Lambasted by critics and censors alike for being too crude for its time, it was seemingly doomed from the get-go, when Jack Lemmon, fresh off of back-to-back-to-back hits with Wilder (Some Like it Hot, The Apartment...
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In the normal run of things, there are very few love triangle films you would ever find me enjoying on the sly, let alone openly praising and defending, but Shunji Iwai’s Hana & Alice is one of them. A beautiful, deceptively complex film, one that is as touching as it is funny, and one...
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With Steven Soderbergh’s imminent retirement (to be a painter) apparently back on, I thought it was time to go back and take a look at the only film of his I genuinely loved, the George Clooney-starring remake, Solaris. Yeah, yeah. A remake. Sacrilege, I know. But spare me, Salman Rushdie. Solaris is not the...
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Early on in Isabella, we find thirtysomething Ma Chen-Shing (Chapman To), a moderately corrupt cop on the island of Macau, as he wakes up and finds the girl he slept with the night before, Cheung Bik-Yan (Isabella Leong), on his couch eating a bowl of instant Ramen. In spite of her apparent young age, his...
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An odd choice for a piece on underrated movies, you say? Well, I agree. My original choice for the week was going to be Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, but while I was away Kim Morgan wrote a great (and must read) piece on it, which was by far better than anything I would...
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