Sith Time’s the Charm

Sat 14 May 200508:43 PM

In the run-up to the final installment in the Star Wars canon, the franchise characters have recently been seen hocking everything from breakfast cereal to cell phones. It’s the customary level of endorsement pervasiveness that makes it hard to ignore this long-awaited but not necessarily highly anticipated final chapter. All of which conspired to convince me to set aside my surprising indifference and sit down to watch the two trailers available over at StarWars.com this afternoon. While I’m enthusiastic about seeing Wookies and the return of Darth Vader proper, overall it’s fair to say that I’m not particularly optimistic about “Episode III” at all.

Sith Time’s the Charm

Sat 14 May 200508:43 PM

How Many Blogs Does One Man Need?

Mon 25 Apr 200507:12 PM

Tape Worm

Sun 6 Mar 200507:42 PM

There’s not enough time in a month for me to watch twenty dollars’ worth of Netflix movies, so I can’t bring myself to subscribe to that service. Economically speaking, I still prefer the old school method of putting on my shoes and heading down to the local video shop when I happen to have a free evening that might be nicely consumed watching a movie. Two Boots Video is only about four blocks away, so I haven’t got much to complain about… except when there’s no DVD copies of the movies I want.

The past few times we’ve gone, my girlfriend and I have resigned ourselves to choices in — hold yourself — videotape format. These are older movies that the store clearly has little immediate intention of upgrading to DVD format. In some cases, like Eric Rohmer’s perversely mannered “Marquise of O,” I’m even a little surprised that someone bought them in VHS format to begin with. But in other cases, it’s a disappointment to me that the store is still resigned to providing them only on crappy videotape. I’m about three episodes into Ken Burns’ beautiful, nine-part “Baseball” documentary, and it’s a shame to watch it on such an inferior medium.

That’s “Incredibles!”

Sun 14 Nov 200401:46 PM

There’s a lot to like in “The Incredibles,” which I just got around to seeing last Thursday night, and there are a lot more people than me who have the time on their hands to cogently explain what’s so good about this latest movie from the egghead animators’ trust at Pixar. So, rather than try and hobble together a half-baked review that’s little more than the sum of a series of random comments, I’ll offer up just the random comments here.

Afterwards

Mon 11 Oct 200411:03 PM

I’m back from Sicily as of yesterday afternoon. I didn’t have internet access while I was away, or I would have written several posts about how amazing Italy is; I’m going to try and round up whatever thoughts I can recoup after ten days of sleeping in late, eating decadently tasty food and drinking lots of red wine, and write something here soon.

In the meantime, I’m feeling a little fuzzy-brained and jetlagged and a little deflated after returning to the reality of a non-vacation life. Mostly though, I’m feeling incredibly sad about Christopher Reeve’s death yesterday. There’s not an actor’s performance in any film that means more to me than Reeve’s in “Superman: The Movie.” It had a profound impact on the way I saw the world as a child, and it still chokes me up to watch it as an adult. It was acutely painful to see Reeve suffer that horrible accident in 1995, and now to see him go at the relatively young age of 52… I can’t possibly articulate the meaning of this loss in a way that would do it any kind of justice.

Elephant in the Room

Fri 24 Sep 200412:47 AM

Hollywood Killer

Tue 24 Aug 200411:46 PM

Unfortunately, I don’t make it out to the movies on opening night as much as I used to, so by the time I get around to seeing a new movie — in the theaters or, if I’m really behind the times, on DVD — and then actually to writing about it here, the point seems lost. My movie reviews have never been the most popular posts anyway, but I do get a kick out of writing them because I still get a kick out of cinema. Anyway, all of this is by way of excusing this glaringly untimely review of “Collateral,” which I just saw last week.

Late to School

Wed 2 Jun 200411:12 PM

It always makes me feel a little silly to be writing here about movies that I’ve just seen on video or DVD, well after they’ve left the theaters and long after any initial excitement they may have stirred up has been dissipated. Unfortunately, with the way my life has worked over the past two years, I see far more films on my DVD player than at the cineplex. So more often than not, I’ll just choose not to write about them at all, but in the case of “School or Rock,” how can I resist?