While the summer season is coming to an end, it’s often known as a time of big loud blockbusters, but it’s also a time of sleepers that surprise you, and you share with friends. Since I normally write about one movie, I’ve decided to write about two that I recently saw, and would love to turn people on to.
Read MoreBodies Bodies Bodies is a reasonably fun little horror film with a good amount of laughs. It’s not bad at all, but neither is it entirely great. It’s a base hit…
Read MoreFurther digressing from the professed theme, this week’s film centers on a person so far into the margins of rock music that he’s a classical pianist. However, it earns inclusion due to its merit as an extremely successful example of a thankfully untraditional musical biography. Because a person’s history can’t be contained in their high highs and low lows, an accurate life story has to include countless digressions into the ordinary, off-topic, and non-narratively dependent. Happily, all of these are included among the eponymous thirty-two short films.
Read MoreUnlike some of these movies, where you see the trailers one million times until you get sick of them, I saw the trailer for Vengeance one single solitary time, but that was all I needed, because it definitely looked like my kind of movie. It looked great, but ended up being way better than I expected! The best of all possible outcomes…
Read MoreYes, this is a story about a (punk) rock band, based on an autobiographical graphic novel by the writer/director’s wife, Coco Moodysson, but by all accounts, it is a loose adaption and probably more fiction than not. As a story of people on the margins of mainstream music, though, it couldn’t be more appropriate. We Are the Best! covers about a year in the lives of three early-1980s Stockholm thirteen-year-old girls who form a band despite only one of them knowing how to play an instrument. This is my favorite movie.
Read MoreOne of the things we’re focusing on is actually returning to our three month seasons. So we’re in the process of confirming most of the titles we’ll show from October to December. I always liked programming a season. There’s a different feeling when you can see a lineup for three months. Like the ebb and flow of the ocean tide. You can see series come and go and how they comment, interact, dialogue with each other.
Read MoreI was listening to a movie review podcast and they were mentioning some recent independent films that they hadn’t had time to see yet, one being Neptune Frost, described as a sci-fi musical. I was immediately intrigued. Later that day I was looking to see if anything interesting was playing at the American Cinematheque, and there it was, Neptune Frost, that very night at 10p! Clearly, it was kismet.
Read MoreThere are, of course, literally hundreds of music documentaries out there with their own well-worn cliches and WATFS is no outlier there. It ticks all the boxes: the band forms, loses members, gains members, finds it’s sound, lots of rock and roll hero stories, missed opportunities, breakthrough, and eventual success. The story is told through interviews with people in and around the band accompanied by a wealth of archival performance footage and photographs. In other words, it’s not breaking acres of new ground here. It simply tells an interesting and entertaining tale over two hours and fifteen minutes.
Read MoreOne of the problems a film programmer runs into again and again these days (though thankfully not as often as you would think) is how to handle problematic films and filmmakers…
Read MoreWhen I saw the poster for Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, I immediately knew that this was a film I wanted to see. It turns out I was completely right, and I rather wish I hadn’t seen the trailer, which gives away too much. On the other hand, it’s not exactly the kind of film where you don’t know right from the start whether the cleaning woman who wants a Dior gown is going to end up with a Dior gown, so it’s hard to spoil, but there are a few twists, and one nice moment I would rather not have known in advance.
Read MoreOn the surface, Her Smell bears many of the same rock biography hallmarks that I railed against in last week’s introductory screed but there are significant variations in this film to elevate it above the irritatingly predictable “biopic” template. The most glaringly obvious of these qualities – and one that I think bears mentioning before going on any further – is that it’s a work of fiction…
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