We were about 20 minutes into Love Lies Bleeding, when I realized: "Oh. This is True Romance." The latter is a Quentin Tarantino scripted and Tony Scott directed film about two lovers in the midst of darker circumstances than either really wants to engage in, who end up being forced to engage and fight their way out. In the latter film, it's Christian Slater, playing a nerdy comic book store employee, and Patricia Arquette, playing a vagabond turning tricks to try to make it somewhere. In Love Lies Bleeding, it's gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O'Brian) who fa ..read more

As noted when Part One came out, two-and-a-half years ago, Denis Villeneuve's style and attention to theme and mood shines through in most of his productions and Dune: Part Two is no different. The visual splendor and Hans Zimmer's excellent score are the high points in this second half the same way they were in the first. And in terms of story structure and trying to encompass all of Frank Herbert's highly-developed universe, this film has the same flaws, in that the actual practical application of the spice and the enormous presence of the Spacing Guild are both absent from what was origi ..read more

I heard the story of Sir Nicholas Winton when it was contemporary, in the late 80s. News emerged that a man who had rescued dozens of Jewish children during World War II had been surprised by a British talk show when it turned out that the rest of the studio audience were, in fact, many of those children. It was a nice story and certainly one that went a long way toward looking at one of the "average" heroes of that time, such as Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat to Lithuania who also facilitated the flight of thousands of Polish Jews from the area, and Jan Swartendijk, who did the same ..read more

I have been and likely always will be a Coen Brothers fan. One of my all-time favorite films is Miller's Crossing, which is a paean to the glories of noir like no other. Many critics felt that it went too far in that respect, in that it became almost a self-parody of itself and the genre as a whole. I've watched it at least a dozen times and would watch it again almost any time, especially if someone else was there and would be willing to hear me extoll its virtues while watching. I feel similarly about many of their other productions (The Big Lebowski, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Barton ..read more

The easiest answer for why this review took four days to get around to writing while the other two were both done the next day is because I was fairly underwhelmed by this year's offering in the Animated section (and, admittedly, I was writing other things, too), with one real exception that didn't even get nominated. So, yeah... But, I recall saying the same thing last year, so perhaps my standards (former comic writer; animation fan) are just higher in this category than others. One of those that I really appreciated, thankfully, was the first: Our Uniform. It's a simple survey of the clot ..read more

The next category, which we actually saw first, was Live Action. As noted earlier, in general, this was the better overall collection of films which, IIRC, is similar to last year. The After- The film tells the story of a businessman who sees both his wife and child murdered in front of him and how he lives in the aftermath (hence, the title.) First off, it's a great performance by David Oyelowo, whom I'm most familiar with from Star Wars: Rebels of all things, as the voice of Agent Kallus. He's been in small parts in a number of films I've seen, but now that I've seen this performanc ..read more

It's Oscar short season and we ended up seeing two categories in one day again. The second was Documentary, but that's the one I'm going to cover first because Live Action, collectively, was the better category this year. Nâi Nai and Wài Pó- This was director Sean Wang's film about his paternal and maternal grandmothers, who live together to support each other, as their respective husbands had passed years ago. It's a very simple presentation about how they go about their daily lives; morning exercise and then activities of various sorts, like gardening or a day for dancing to music. It was ..read more

There are moments when various forms of media feel like they're speaking directly to you. The characters react the way that you'd react and the storyline follows something that's, to one degree or another, intimately familiar to you. That was the reaction that I had when watching American Fiction. It's not just that the main character Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (an excellent Jeffrey Wright) is a writer who can't seem to find his audience (been there, my whole life) or that the material that's produced around him seems like it's just serving the base interests of the public [waves hand in gene ..read more

I love post-apocalypse stories. When I first started reading Harlan Ellison, one of my favorites of his work was A Boy and his Dog, which is set in America, post-nuclear disaster. One of my favorite films at a young age was John Carpenter's Escape from New York. When I first started running RPGs, my favorite setting was Gamma World. It's safe to say that I'm a child of the Cold War. So, when I heard that there was a film on Netflix that was really popular and that fit those themes, I was definitely interested. Unfortunately, that film was Leave the World Behind and it was a failure on so ..read more

I was looking forward to seeing Maestro, Bradley Cooper's latest film about the life of Leonard Bernstein. Larissa objected, thinking that she would find it too slow, as there's a lot to talk about in Bernstein's complicated life. Then we found out that it was a Netflix production, so we can watch it whenever, so that problem was solved. But we had already decided to see Fallen Leaves instead. The latter is a Finnish production about two average people leading fairly downtrodden lives who discover each other by chance and try to make contact, but keep stumbling over themselves, their lives ..read more