I am facing a bit of a crossroads at this moment. None of the new films being released today look like they are worth my time, yet one stars Eugene Hutz and features the music of his band, and one of my favorites, Gogol Bordello. Most will probably recognize Eugen from his scene stealing role in Everything is Illuminated, but Gogol Bordello is where his true genius is laid bare for everyone to hear. The problem is Filth and Wisdom is the directorial debut of Madonna, and the thought of watching her movie makes me want to dry heave. So my recommendation is to not go see Filth and Wisdom, but please watch Everything is Illuminated and track down a Gogol Bordello CD. I promise that you will not be disappointed by either.
Then on Tuesday the fantastic documentary Billy the Kid is finally released on DVD. It follows the adventures of a young boy named Billy, as he attempts to find love in his small town. It had a short run at the Parkway Theater here in Minneapolis, and now hopefully with this release it will garner a bit larger audience. It really is a great film, and easily one of the better films released last year.
I decided several weeks ago that I would get into the Halloween spirit by reviewing a horror film next week. So I did careful research and selected an interesting unknown Czech horror film that looked rather promising, but somewhere along the way I decided that I was possibly over thinking things. Sure a film that blends live actions with stop-motion animation as it delves into the struggle with sanity while delving into works by the Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allen Poe sounds deliciously fascinating and horrific, but this is Halloween we are talking about.
So I scratched that previous film (Don’t worry, it will be back) in favor of something a bit more fitting, gore. Specifically gore is direct relation to an HP Lovecraft film. And what goes better with HP Lovecraft then Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs? That is why next week I will be reviewing From Beyond.
This is going to be a quick post as my router has been incredibly passive aggressive with me all day, cutting in and out whenever it is most inconvenient, causing me to lose the hundreds, nay, thousands of hours of work I did this morning. And now as we speak the network has completely vanished, leaving me to run off the overloaded connection being dispersed by the local library.
So yes, even though it is evidently Liv Tyler week (The Incredible Hulk, The Strangers) when it comes to new DVD releases, I am going with something completely different. Primarily because The Strangers was stupid and The Incredible Hulk looks stupid. So, in honor of on screen stupidity I am picking a Paul Walker flick, The Lazarus Project. Surely it can’t be any dumber then the previous films mentioned.
As for theatrical releases, even though W is being released and Rachel Getting Married is garnering some rather surprising critical acclaim, my selection this week is The Pool. From director Chris Smith, best know for the amazing documentary American Movie, comes his first fiction film about a poor boy living in India who becomes obsessed with a swimming pool in one of the richest neighborhoods in his city.
It has been a few months since I have reviewed a film for this site that was not made earlier then 1970 and I figured it was time to change that. At least for this next week anyways. So I decided it was time to go old school. But not just old school, but old school cool. Which means film noir, French New Wave and Miles Davis. Next week I review Elevator to the Gallows.
Being born in the mid-seventies, I grew up with a pretty severe lack of exposure to computers for the majority of my schooling. Sure we had a computer lab where we would learn how to use a computer, but that was rarely more frequent then once a week and the majority of that time was spent playing Oregon Trail. My family didn’t even have a PC until I was in High School, and even then most of my teachers preferred papers to be typed rather then printed on computers. Even when I went off to school at a Big Ten university in the mid-nineties, computers still were not a huge component of the work I did. Though it was in college that I finally began to use the Internet. First on Gopher and later through the World Wide Web. Back in those days 28.8k modems was scorching fast, and texting wasn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar.
Today college is a vastly different environment. Most students own their own laptops, attend classes online and have never lived in a world where computers and the Internet weren’t simply a seamless extension of their lives. So when director Melody Gilbert came up with the idea of filming a documentary about three students (Mitchell Lundin, Andrew Tate and Caitlin Magnusson) at Carleton college who choose to not use any computers for three weeks, I was immediately intrigued. Just how would they pull this off, and just how miserable will they become trying to accomplish such a task?
Note to self: If ever I decide to write a movie that is based in Wisconsin, evidently it is a requirement to include some sort of wood cutting scene with a ginormous axe.
Having just recently watched The Wintress, I found it a bit amusing that another film starring Bill Elverman would focus so much on splitting wood with an ax. Knowing Elverman wrote both The Wintress and TREE I secretly wondered if Elverman had an unhealthy obsession with axes. My guess is he watched The Shining one too many times as a child. I know I did. But evidently, their was a far more innocuous reason for including so many axes in both films, TREE was made first, and Elverman likes to plagiarize himself because this idea works quite well in the context of these two films.
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