The Usual Suspects - Bryan Singer (1995, DVD)
Not the first time we've seen this. Um, it's a great movie? You should see it over and over? And I just wanted to get a new post on the new site to say we're back in business?
| Comments (3) | TrackBack (267) | link me | November 2004

Donnie Brasco - Mike Newell (1997, DVD)
You think that after slamming through a season of the Sopranos, we'd be tired of mob movies? Fuggedaboutit! Very engaging film. Interesting to see Pacino in the role of a mobster in slow decline, in contrast to his role in The Godfather. And who doesn't like Johnny Depp?
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (64) | link me | November 2002

Jackie Brown - Quentin Tarantino (1997, DVD)
Relatively understated for Tarantino, which on the whole may be a good thing. Weird casting; Samuel Jackson and Robert DeNiro are almost wasted playing stupid thugs, while B-movie actor Robert Forster plays what turns out to be a pivotal role (and does it well).
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (96) | link me | October 2002

Shaft - John Singleton (2000, DVD)
A lot less campy than I expected it might be. Starts off very tight; plot sort of comes apart through the middle and end. Despite working nipple shots into the opening credits, the movie's treatment of sex is limited to a bit of innuendo, which just ain't right: where's the sex machine we were promised? I mean, come on, "Shaft", what else is there to say?
| Comments (15) | TrackBack (55) | link me | October 2002

Dirty Harry - Don Siegel (1971, VHS)
Wow! I've never actually seen any of the Dirty Harry movies, and this beat my expectations quite a bit, grabbing my attention from the moment we got past the annoying trailers for ALL FOUR DIRTY HARRY MOVIES at the beginning of the tape. (Contrast with 1968's Bullitt, also set in SF, which bored me to tears.) Eastwood isn't really my favorite actor, but for me, the real star of the show is the San Francisco of thirty years ago, looking much like it does today. I hadn't realized the rainbows painted on the tunnel north of the Golden Gate Bridge, for example, were that old. Today's Tenderloin peepshow neon looks like North Beach's did then. Andy Robinson's psycho killer, "Scorpio", is a weird blend of cheerful psychotic villain and lame shortsighted wimp, not really strong or smart or ballsy enough to stand up to Eastwood's supercop. (Contrast with Malkovich going up against Eastwood in In the Line of Fire, another vaguely effeminate (NTTAWWT) psycho who remains scary up to the last, and never comes off as foolish.) Somehow I had thought the "did I fire six shots, or five? ... do you feel lucky?" speech was from the "make my day" sequel; I hadn't realized it was such an old reference. Chicago Industrial Music Trivia #1: I suspect that my man Chris Connelly got his Wax Trax side project pseudonym, Scorpio, from the movie; while the actor was born in NYC, he sounds Scots-accented in parts, and has a certain facial resemblance to CC. Chicago Industrial Music Trivia #2: Besides the obviously recognizable "well, do ya, punk?" samples that pop up everywhere, the thug who accosts Callahan while he's on his ransom mission, saying "what's in the bag?" is sampled on Revolting Cocks' "Crackin' Up" (which, natch, features Chris Connelly).
| Comments (2) | TrackBack (58) | link me | October 2002

Pulp Fiction - Quentin Tarantino (1994, DVD)
The definitive Tarantino movie. Profanity and violence raised to the level of art through the injection of cleverness and warmth. The movie is also a huge nexus of cinematic influence: referencing and referenced in well over 100 movies (according to the IMDB), it's an unavoidable piece of American film culture.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (203) | link me | September 2002

Novocaine - David Atkins (2001, DVD)
Comic and Hitchcockian; Steve Martin is excellent as the dentist getting drawn deeper into trouble as the result of a couple of bad decisions.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (119) | link me | May 2002

Goodfellas - Martin Scorcese (1990, DVD)
While Tad thought this was better than The Godfather, I don't agree. It's good, certainly, but has little of the epicity (is that a word?) of the earlier film.
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (309) | link me | January 2002

The Godfather: Part II - Francis Ford Coppola (1974, DVD)
More of a companion piece than a sequel to the original Godfather film; it tells two interwoven stories of the Corleone family, with Robert de Niro's Vito Corleone establishing the 'family business' in the early part of the century, and Al Pacino as his son Michael Corleone guiding it through changes in the 50s. IMDB lists Godfather and Godfather Part II as its #1 and #3 ranked movies, all the more remarkable given the overall skew towards more modern films in their ranking. Watch the two back to back, they're classics and well worth the time.
| Comments (12) | TrackBack (366) | link me | November 2001

The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola (1972, DVD)
You have seen it, haven't you? (If not, it's okay, we went our whole lives up to this point before getting around to it. But see it, okay?)
| Comments (16) | TrackBack (61) | link me | November 2001

Killing Zoe - Roger Avary (1994, DVD)
A tense heist-and-psychodrama film; writer-director Avary is known for co-writing screenplays with Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance), and while there are elements of this movie which wouldn't be out of place in a Tarantino film, the tone here is darker and less silly.
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (128) | link me | October 2001

Blow - Ted Demme (2001, DVD)
Pretty good dramatized story of the man who established the cocaine biz in the US in the '70s. Interestingly, the DVD includes an interview with the real George Jung in prison. Oh: cocaine bad.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (93) | link me | September 2001

The Pledge - Sean Penn (2001, DVD)
This starts off looking like a fairly standard cop-chasing-serial-killer flick, but with some above-average touches: Jack Nicholson not overacting, small-town cops being really convincingly freaked out by the brutal murder of a child, Robin Wright Penn's performance as a battered single mother. The ending just about gave me whiplash, though, and left me a little disappointed.
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (58) | link me | June 2001

The Score - Frank Oz (2001, in theatre)
A really slick heist film. Two thumbs up. Ed Norton and Robert de Niro play off each other very nicely as the old pro and the young upstart.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (73) | link me | June 2001

Snatch - Guy Ritchie (2000, DVD)
meriko and I were split on both this and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. I liked 'em both. Brad Pitt does as much fighting here as he did in Fight Club, and has an amusing impenetrable meta-Irish gypsy accent.
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (16) | link me | June 2001

The French Connection - William Friedkin (1971, VHS)
For the life of me, I don't know how this won the Oscar for Best Picture. 1971 must have been a pretty bad year. Plot? Confusing yet dull, and where I could follow it, I kept seeing holes. Acting? Roy Scheider's more wooden than usual. A user review on IMDB calls this "perhaps [Gene Hackman's] greatest performance"; I must have blinked and missed it. "The best car chase ever filmed?" Since it's a car chasing an El train, it involves Gene Hackman driving in a straight line at top speed, honking his horn a lot and looking frustrated. Oh, maybe it was the brilliant ending, which was, um, different, if not in any way satisfying. As it turns out, the storyline was based on a real-life incident. Does that make it a good story? The car chase scene was done in one take and includes unplanned collisions and near-running-over of innocent people who had nothing to do with the film. Does that make it a good car chase? This seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it movie -- most of the people who have provided comments on the IMDB seem to like it quite a bit better than I do, so keep your grain of salt handy.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (38) | link me | March 2001

The Sting - George Roy Hill (1973, DVD)
As happens frequently, mko and I went to Lost Weekend and came back with a movie that should have been on the whiteboard, but wasn't. M had never seen The Sting, and while I know I'd seen bits and pieces of it as a tyke, I really didn't know what it was about. At any rate, it's a great film, deservedly a classic. If you haven't seen it, go rent it right now.
| Comments (2) | TrackBack (135) | link me | March 2001

True Romance - Tony Scott (1993, DVD)
I'd seen this one before when it first came out, and didn't remember it very well. If you don't mind Tarantino-standard violence, it's quite good, if a little uneven. (I'm not a huge Tarantino fan, but on the other hand, I don't mind senseless violence in film either.) There are a number of big-name actors in this film, some of whom weren't so big at the time it was made (Gary Oldman, Samuel Jackson, Brad Pitt). On the other hand, Christian Slater and Bronson Pinchot's careers have been in the toilet since, so go figure. Individual scenes stand out: Dennis Hopper is unusually restrained in his classic face-off with ever-psychotic Christopher Walken, or perhaps he just loaned a few of his psychoses out to Patricia Arquette for her fight scene.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (80) | link me | March 2001

Bullitt - Peter Yates (1968, DVD)
Well known for its high-speed San Francisco car chase scene. Other than that, the movie didn't do a whole lot for me, but I'm not a huge fan of the determined-cop genre. I was more intrigued by the chance to compare and contrast the image of San-Francisco-1968 with San-Francisco-2000. Be sure to watch for the green VW bug appearing repeatedly in the chase. We mainly watched this one on the provocation of meriko's parents, who claimed that there were an improbable number of hubcaps coming off the cars during the chase. We didn't ourselves see an inordinate number of hubcaps, just the VW. In addition to the basic DVD, there's also a collector's edition package on Amazon including a copy of the shooting script and a large poster for around $70. I kind of wonder who's going to be that obsessive about a 30-plus-year-old movie...
| Comments (2) | TrackBack (28) | link me | December 2000

The Thin Man - W.S. Van Dyke (1934, VHS)
Comedic mystery from the olden days when alcoholism was funny. "Will you bring me five more martinis, Leo, and line them up right here?"
| Comments (1) | TrackBack (212) | link me | December 2000

Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich (1955, VHS)
A Mickey Spillane "Mike Hammer" story. I've tried really hard to like the classic noir/hardboiled detective genre, and it just hasn't worked for me yet. The Macguffin of this story seems to have been among the inspirations for Pulp Fiction's glowing briefcase, though.
| Comments (0) | TrackBack (56) | link me | December 2000