Looking back over 2013, the most significant titles in my disk viewing have been imported from England or released by Criterion.
Year End 2013
Tag: Comedy
Late Summer Viewing, part 1
Falling behind again! Things have been hectic lately – working on a documentary which has turned out to be bigger than expected and is now way overdue, plus starting a new project with a tight deadline, I haven’t had a lot of time to write down notes on what I’ve been watching the past couple […]
Compulsive Viewing: A Personal Pathology Part 2
Continuing my survey of one month’s movie viewing: Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012): As dumb as John Milius’ original about small town American kids fighting against vicious invaders. Milius had Nicaragua(!) taking over the States; here it’s North Korea backed by, for some reason, the Russians (aware of how much U.S. debt is held by […]
Deconstructing Hollywood … for laughs: Hellzapoppin (1941)
A friend who teaches film to university students occasionally offers a course in comedy. He’d originally thought it would be fun, but was quickly disillusioned. Of course, comedy, more than drama, tends to be specific to its context as jokes are frequently dependent on shared cultural referents. So these student fans of Adam Sandler, American […]
John Dies At the End … and that’s not a bad thing
I’ve been a fan of Don Coscarelli’s work since the first time I saw Phantasm in 1979. Made when he was just 24, that film followed two “family” features – Jim, The World’s Greatest (1976, co-directed with Craig Mitchell), about a boy dealing with his alcoholic father; and Kenny & Company (1976), about a week […]
Year End 2012
A few days ago I spent the evening with four friends at our annual get-together to discuss what we had seen during the past year. Back when I was first invited to join the group years ago, there would often be heated arguments about the particular merits of this or that movie, but we’ve all […]
More in-flight entertainment
Flying to England a few weeks ago for my nephew’s wedding, my experience of airline entertainment was even less satisfying than on my trip to Beijing last year. As before, the wide selection of movie choices was undeniably eclectic – in the “avant garde” section, for instance, we were offered Morgan Spurlock’s Comic Con Episode […]
DVD Review: The Disco Exorcist (2011)
It’s 1979 and blithely charming narcissist Rex Romanski (Michael Reed) spots sultry Rita Marie (Ruth Sullivan) across the disco floor. Dancing inevitably leads to hot sex and they meet up at the club again the next night. But Rex’s eye is already roaming and he makes contact with the woman of his dreams, pornstar Amoreena […]
Recent Viewing part 3: brief notes
Two years after writing The Wild Bunch (1969), Walon Green teamed up with respected documentary producer David L. Wolper for one of the oddest films ever to win an Academy Award. The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), although it got the Oscar for best documentary, isn’t actually a documentary at all … or at least it calls […]
Michael Dowse’s Goon: Made in Winnipeg
Winnipeg may have been put on the cinematic map by the international success of Guy Maddin, and there have occasionally been other interesting home-grown movies – the best feature ever made here, Greg Hanec’s Downtime (1985), is finally getting a DVD release sometime this year – but mostly, production in Winnipeg falls into the “service” […]
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