Is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives a realist movie with surreal aspects, or a surreal movie with realist aspects? For all the queries the film poses about living and dying, the sixth directorial feature of Thailand’s Apichatpong Weereasethakul (you can just call him “Joe”, though), the previous question winds up being its … Continue reading
Foreword: Emphasis on the “love” of the title. No matter how much I find myself split on the oeuvre of living B-movie/grindhouse/exploitation cinema archive and all-around film enthusiast Quentin Tarantino, I can’t ever bring myself to revile the man himself in any fashion. There’s no way around it; he’s a mensch, and we should all … Continue reading
13 Assassins falls into a category of films woefully burdened by an inescapable family resemblance that dogs their existence on one level or another. In the case of the latest offering from Japanese shock filmmaker, Takashi Miike, anyone who’s heard of Kurosawa can trace the film’s lineage back to 1954, the release year of the … Continue reading
Who knew radical fundamentalist terrorism could be so hilarious? Chris Morris, the twisted and brilliant mind behind 2010’s Four Lions, came to that exact realization himself and put his ideas to celluloid with a tale of utterly incompetent homegrown Jihadists conspiring to carry out an attack in London. If at a glance the film’s premise … Continue reading
Leave it to the incomparable Werner Herzog to take the experience of filming chicken-scratch paintings on the walls of a long-sealed cave in the mountains of southern France and turn it into a rumination on the aspirations of humanity and an examination of art’s purpose throughout the history of our species. Herzog, the eccentric and … Continue reading
I like to think that modern audiences understand and accept that the performers, filmmakers, and other media personalities they admire and support are actual people underneath the images they project. So in theory, a movie like Rodman Flender’s Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop should feel like a no-brainer, and the sight of the titular beloved comedian … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 