Archive for December, 2009

  • 31 Dec

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    New Year’s Flicks

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    Looking for something to lift your spirits this New Year’s Eve? Here’s yet another list. This one though a list of movies that highlight New Year’s Eve/Day in one way or another. I can’t say they’re all good, but hey, what is?

    [via]

    When Harry Met Sally
    Possibly the greatest New Year’s Eve scene of all: After years as friends with (occasional) benefits, Harry (Billy Crystal) finally declares his love for Sally (Meg Ryan). The best quote? ”It’s not because I’m lonely, and it’s not because it’s New Year’s Eve,” Harry says after party-crashing. ”I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

    Bridget Jones’s Diary
    You’re single, a little sad and are bracing for a booze-soaked New Year’s Eve blowout. It could be worse: You could have to face your mom tomorrow at a turkey curry buffet. This Renée Zellweger romp is perfect NYE material: It’s all about fresh starts, clean slates and Colin Firth.

    Someone Like You
    It’s romantic comedy 101: New Year’s Eve rolls around and our heroine (the plucky Ashley Judd) realizes her feelings for a platonic pal (the hunky Hugh Jackman). (It helps that she’s been stood up by her bad-news ex-boyfriend.) She rushes out to meet him — but will she make it in time for a countdown kiss?

    Sex and the City: The Movie
    It’s kinda like the scenario from “Someone Like You.” Only this time the role of Ashley Judd is played by Cynthia Nixon. Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie Bradshaw) rushes to Miranda’s apartment for a New Year’s bonding session. She even (gasp!) takes the subway. Now that’s a good friend.

    Sleepless in Seattle
    Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are at the top of their game in this romantic comedy. But the sweetest scene comes when Hanks’ grieving Sam Baldwin imagines a New Year’s Eve conversation with his deceased wife (played by the ethereal Carey Lowell). ”Here’s to us.”

    Trading Places
    Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis (with her Swedish meatballs) board a New York-bound party train for New Year’s in this comedy classic. Bonus: the movie’s anti-fat-cat-banker sentiment feels just as relevant today as is it was in 1983.

    200 Cigarettes
    Set during New Year’s Eve, 1981, this quirky nostalgia piece stars a who’s who of the late ’90s: Ben and Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Christina Ricci, Dave Chappelle, Janeane Garofalo, Martha Plimpton, Paul Rudd, Gaby Hoffmann and Courtney Love.

    The Hudsucker Proxy
    OK, so we’re still reeling from the Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon breakup news. But that doesn’t make this New Year’s Eve-set film (directed by the Coen Brothers and co-starring the divine Paul Newman) any less enjoyable. Be prepared to break out the hula hoops.

    Sunset Boulevard
    New Year’s Eve is all about looking ahead — even for a fading silent movie star who’s trapped in the past. This 1950 gem (starring Gloria Swanson as the past-her-prime legend and William Holden as her reluctant boy toy) perfectly captures the melancholy misery of forced optimism.

    Entrapment
    No plans this evening? Why not pull off a major bank heist. Before you do, though, invite Catherine Zeta Jones over and watch her wiggle around on the floor.

    Poseidon
    No matter how bad your night is, at least you’re not stuck on a rapidly sinking cruise ship with Josh Lucas and Fergie. Boom, boom, POW!

     

  • 31 Dec

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    Golden Moments of the Past Ten Years

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    As these past few weeks have flown by there have been all manner of best of the decade lists. Of course I can’t help but dive right into the fold with my own reminiscing. Think back to where we started at the beginning of this decade and it’s almost hard to believe. Probably all of the movie web sites that you frequent now hadn’t even been dreamed up yet. The World Trade Center was still standing. What is an iPod? No YouTube, no Wikipedia and Yahoo was still the preferred method of searching for things on the internet. The good news? Though we didn’t know it yet, we had all of these great films to look forward to. Even if the film itself isn’t your cup of tea, these scenes stand alone as wonderful gems swimming in a pool of thousands of thousands of scenes captured over the past ten years. In no particular order (not even necessarily a “best of” list), here is a nice little smattering of memorable scenes. Made delightful either by intelligent scripting, amazing choreography, beautiful cinematography, acting showcases, specialized directing or simply whacky fun. Whatever; the past ten years has been riddled with joy in the cinema.

    SUNSHINE – Mercury eclipses the sun. Gorgeous. Pure and simple.

     

     

    ALMOST FAMOUS – Possibly my favorite scene of the decade. “Tiny Dancer” on the bus ride. “Woosh. You are home.”

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 31 Dec

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    Talk Amongst Yourselves

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    Usually reserved for Friday afternoons, this weekly segment is appearing a day early this time in order to compensate for the New Year’s holiday in which I’ll be too inebriated to type, much less comprehend how to embed a photo and construct coherent sentences. So here ya go. Talk amongst yourselves…

     

  • 31 Dec

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    Review: A Single Man

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    Colin Firth as a Single Man

     

    Director: Tom Ford
    Writers: Tom Ford, Christopher Isherwood, David Scearce
    Starring: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 101 min.

    (4.5/5)

    I have a soft spot for stories about outsiders, characters on the fringe of society, closeted or withdrawn. The mad ones as Kerouac called them. The stories have been told many times, and not always to great effect, yet occasionally a film comes along that goes further and finds a way to tell the story anew. Tom Ford’s A Single Man is just such a film. In style or tone, it bears shades of In the Mood for Love or Far From Heaven, but on the whole, from the reverse fade to black to the last fade to white, nothing was predictable and cinema for a couple of hours felt fresh again. Leave it to a first time director to open the possibilities of what can be done with the medium before the rigor mortis of familiarity had a chance to lay siege on him.

    At the center of A Single Man is George Falconer (Colin Firth), an English professor recently widowed by the premature death of his longtime partner (Matthew Goode), who finds himself looking for a way out of the virile world of veneers and empty sentiments left in his absence. Obstacles abound in Ford’s depiction of Los Angeles in the sixties, a personal hell by way of Life Magazine through which the neurosis of Falconer is felt; as he says early on in the film, “A world without sentiment is not a world I wish to live in”. There is little solace to be had in the closeted single life he endures, socializing with his long-divorced dilettante friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), each reminding the other of what they sorely lack. Wounded, Falconer resigns himself to self-pity and the fleeting memories of bliss he once knew, aware that eventually he will have to take some kind of action. An Aldous Huxley maxim is used to underscore his existential dilemma: “experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him”. » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 31 Dec

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    Nic Cage as Everyone

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    Nice.

    http://niccageaseveryone.blogspot.com/

     

  • 31 Dec

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    That’s All Folks!

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  • 30 Dec

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    Laughable, Man

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    Since no one is really posting or reading movie blogs during these holiday days, I suppose that earns me the right to be equally as lazy and simply post another Star Wars related video. This one might have you smiling… or weirded out; one of the two.

     

  • 29 Dec

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    Review: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

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    [Yes, Rowthree programming as usual will be continuing shortly into the new year, in the mean time, if you happen to be in a major film market, do yourselves a favour and check out Terry Gilliam's latest, reprinted below is our pre-TIFF review of the film.]

    TIFF-Review_Parnassus

    A question: “Where are we – geographically, socially, narratively?”
    A snappy reply: “The northern hemisphere, on the margins, further to go.”

    There are three great surprises of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. The first is that Terry Gilliam is back in top form, weaving the contemporary and the fantastical into a whimsical and dark package. Despite the death of Heath Ledger occurring in the middle of production, that which forced the subsequent hiring of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to complete the part, works charmingly well in the film. This second surprise is so deeply woven into the plot that it looks like this was the intent all along. The third one, perhaps the most surprising of the bunch, is that Terry Gilliam has commandeered the digital effects so effectively that the film retains its nostalgia simultaneously to looking modern. The films deceptively simple plot forms serves to evoke the best of former Python’s directorial work and at the same time (or so I am told) close up a loose trilogy of the imagination starting with fragile innocence of Time Bandits, carrying forward to the full blown exuberance contained in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and reflecting on mortality, wisdom (with more than a hint of melancholy) with Dr. Parnassus.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 28 Dec

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    Film on TV: December 28-January 3rd

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    Renaissance.jpg
    Renaissance, playing Monday at 8:25am on IFC

     

    Not too many new ones this week, but still plenty of great films to round out the year, including a marathon of Hitchcock’s best films on TCM on New Year’s Eve, followed by the entire Thin Man series overnight. EDIT: Sorry the early ones on Monday, including Renaissance (pictured above) have already happened. I scheduled the post to post last night and for whatever reason, WordPress thought it better not to post it.

    Monday, December 28

    6:15am – Sundance – Adaptation.
    Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s follow-up to Being John Malkovich is slightly less bizarre, but still pretty out there – just in a more subtle way. Nicolas Cage plays a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman who’s stuck in his attempt to adapt a bestseller; it doesn’t help when his successful brother (also played by Cage) shows up. The end feels like it’s going off the rails, but that’s all part of the genius.
    2002 USA. Director: Spike Jonze. Starring: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Tilda Swinton, Chris Cooper.

    8:25am – IFC – Renaissance
    In near-future Paris, a brilliant young scientist is kidnapped; her employer Avalon (a highly influential company that sells youth and beauty itself) wants her found, but her importance to them may be more sinister than first meets the eye. The story’s not handled perfectly here, but it’s worth watching for the beautifully stark black and white animation.
    2006 France. Director: Christian Volckman. Starring (English version): Daniel Craig, Romola Garai, Ian Holm, Catherine McCormack, Jonathan Pryce.
    Newly Featured!
    (repeats at 2:05pm)

    10:45am – IFC – Before Sunrise
    Before Sunrise may be little more than an extended conversation between two people (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) who meet on a train in Europe and decide to spend all night talking and walking the streets of Vienna, I fell in love with it at first sight. Linklater has a way of making movies where nothing happens seem vibrant and fascinating, and call me a romantic if you wish, but this is my favorite of everything he’s done.
    1995 USA. Director: Richard Linklater. Starring: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy.
    Must See
    (repeats at 4:00pm, and 5:05am on the 29th)

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 28 Dec

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    Sighting: “Ink” at the Mounds

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    If you’re in the Minneapolis area over the next few days, do yourself a favor and head over to The Mounds theater for a terrific, sci-fi, fantasy adventure story entitled Ink. Matt Gamble and I were lucky enough to catch this little indie gem last fall at the Flyway film fest and it was one of our favorites.

    See the trailer underneath the seats. And if you haven’t done so already, check out our audio interview with director and star Jamin Winans and Chris Kelly.

    Tues & Wed, Dec. 29 & 30
    7:00 PM | Pay What You Can     ($5 Suggested Donation)

     

    LINKS:
    RowThree review
    IMDb profile
    Official Site

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 28 Dec

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    Another One? Yes, Another One

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    Han Solo, P.I.
    MacGuyver Wars
     

  • 28 Dec

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    Upular

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    I can’t decide if this is as cool as the actual movie or not. It’s gotta come close. “Upular” by Pogo, is an awesome electronic composition using sounds and clips from the movie Up. Pogo is an emerging electronic music artist in Perth, Western Australia. He is known for his work recording small sounds from a single film or scene and sequencing them to form a new piece of music.

    Check out this very innovative, and really nifty sounding, piece of remixed music below the seats, taken from one of our favorite movies of the year.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

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