A Gilded Planet

Run Lola Run   1998. 80 minutes. Germany. Directed by Tom Tykwer. Watchdate: 11/17/2010. Tom Tykwer seems to be a real maestro at merging form and content. That is to say, he not only successfully matches the story he's telling with a perfect style of telling it but he actually does so in a way that it's hard to tell the difference between the two. I didn't like this quite as much as Perfume , but it was a lot of fun nonetheless - a great cinematic exercise. The bank robbery scene in particular was excellent - bank robberies have been dramatized so many times by now that it's rare to see one crafted in a new way, but he pulled it off with flair. The Mirror   1975. 106 minutes. Russia. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Watchdate: 11/16/2010. Like Stalker , Tarkovsky's The Mirror is somewhat mystifying. With an even more glacial pace, it explores childhood, love and divorce in extremely personal terms. It was difficult for me to watch for various reasons, and I know I...

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here are the 226th,  225th, and 224th  movies I watched: I Love You Phillip Morris 2010. 102 min. USA. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Watchdate: 12/17/2010. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa seem to specialize in fucked up criminal fairy tales like Bad Santa  and this movie, which was really a whole lot of fun. Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor are both at the top of their game, and the movie plays like a dark comedy version of Catch Me If You Can  with more complex political and psychosexual undertones. I'm a big fan of the con artist subgenre perhaps best defined by classic 70s movies like The Sting  and Paper Moon , and this is really quite an inventive entry into that tradition because it subverts the form nearly as much as it follows its well worn patterns. It's treatment of AIDS in particular really has to be seen to believed. But I think my favorite bit involves a scene in prison where McGregor pays ...

I watched 232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here are the 228th and 229th movies that I watched. 127 Hours 2010. 94 min. USA/UK. Directed by Danny Boyle. Watchdate: 12/21/2010 So first, a realization. James Franco is almost always as good or better than the movies he appears in. This holds true both in good movies (he's pretty much the best thing in Pineapple Express ) and in terrible ones (he's practically the only good thing in Howl ). This is definitely true here too, as he is terrific while the movie itself has problems. It's not bad by any means, but it does begin like a television commercial and too often has the feeling of being that sort of slick contraption. There's also one moment near the end that smacked of sentimentalism partly because of the brief and thankfully abortive deployment of one of those Feist/Spektor/Enya type sirens in the musical score. Other than the those two noisome flaws, the movie works fairly well. It does not rely too much at all on...