Flipside Movie Emporium

[xAndyx]

Ocean's Eleven (Soderbergh, 2001)

Ocean's Twelve (Soderbergh, 2004)

Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)

I thought that Ocean's Eleven was a great movie. It was witty, fun, and had a cast I enjoyed greatly. Ocean's Twelve, which I watched directly after Eleven, was alright. It had a lot of the same good qualities, but they were not at the level of the first film, and I just felt like something was missing. I leave you with ... Taxi Driver = AWESOME
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One day you will look behind you and you will see we three, and on that day, you will repent, and we will send you to whatever god you wish.

-The Boondock Saints

[beltmann]

[Monkeypox]

[xAndyx]

[beltmann]

4/18 ? 4/24/05

In chronological order:

Up and Down (Hrebejk, Czech Republic 2004)

Shooting Shona(Pastoll and Pastoll, UK 2004)

Memory (Sherbert, USA 2004)

Disease of the Wind (Keach, USA 2003)

I Don't Know What Your Eyes Have Done To Me (Munoz and Wolf, Argentina 2003)

Kung Fu Hustle (Chow, Hong Kong 2004)

Chasing Redemption (Stanford, USA 2005)

The Break Up Film (Miller, USA 2003)

Melinda and Melinda (Allen, USA 2005)

The Upside of Anger (Binder, USA 2005)

Of those I most enjoyed Kung Fu Hustle?which actually scores the sense of exuberance Chow aimed for and missed in Shaolin Soccer?and The Upside of Anger, despite the twist ending which is both inappropriate and utterly unconvincing. I also liked I Don't Know What Your Eyes Have Done To Me, a documentary about Ada Falc?n, the legendary Argentinean singer who abandoned tango fame and fortune in the ?40s to become a recluse. The filmmakers employ an elegiac, subjective style that is equal parts journalism, speculation, myth, collective memory, and expos? of the documentary form itself. What finally emerges, though, is the story of a woman who gave up everything for a conviction?and that decision helps illuminate the gulf between public and private lives. Good stuff.

Melinda and Melinda is more beige filmmaking from Woody Allen, and expresses only the most banal observations about how comedy is the flipside of tragedy. At this point I'd like to see Allen tackle something completely different. Is Bad Boys III in search of a director?

Eric
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"When I was in Barcelona they showed pornography on regular television. I'm assuming it's the same way in Mexico since they also speak Spanish." - IMDb user comment

[Danny Baldwin]

[beltmann]

Joan Allen once again proves herself the greatest living American actress, and Kevin Costner--so underrated all these years--gives another shaggy, likable performance. Their skill in The Upside of Anger is easy to miss, perhaps because the movie resists plummeting into the kind of dark drama that fishes for awards. This is both the movie's strength and weakness: Sometimes the plot turns aren't given enough weight (the drama of the dancer's hospital stay totally fizzles out, and the Wood character mouths nonsense), but most of the movie maintains an unfamiliar, singular tone that deserves admiration. Pitched somewhere between sincerity and whimsy, The Upside of Anger makes all the same points that Melinda and Melinda makes, but far more evocatively and effectively. Joan Allen injects the thesis with something that resembles life, Woody Allen reduces it to a creaky puzzle.

That final twist, though, is hogwash. I don't buy it, not even as whimsy. It doesn't hold up under any level of scrutiny.

Eric
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"When I was in Barcelona they showed pornography on regular television. I'm assuming it's the same way in Mexico since they also speak Spanish." - IMDb user comment

[Danny Baldwin]

[Danny Baldwin]

A Lot Like Love (Cole, 2005) - Surprisingly impressive work from Peet and Kutcher highlights this little gem of a movie, which has come out of nowhere, and will probably leave the minds of most very soon, unfortunately.

The Interpreter (Pollack, 2005) - Masterfully crafted and well-performed, but I found several of its parallels to the current political climate regarding brutal leaders of countries offensive and blatant. For the first two acts, it's hard to determine where it's headed or what reason it has for going there, but it does come together, in the end.

Birth (Glazer, 2005) - Boring and utterly dreckish in every sense. The long, rolling montage sequences have no point--just like everything else in the movie. All it manages to do is weird you out.
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Danny Baldwin

View My Reviews

[beltmann]

[beltmann]

[Danny Baldwin]

[Danny Baldwin]

[Balthazor]

I haven't, due to some amounts of work and a small otherwise interesting 'project' I am undergoing, have been unable to watch nearly as much as I would otherwise be inclined towards. However, from the 18?Th to the 25?Th, I have watched:

Mr. Vampire

Willard

White Oleander

Each of those was a completely different undertaking. I watched Mr. Vampire to some disdain. It was, I suppose, exactly what it had promised: A kung fu, vampire, horror comedy. That is to say, that it attempted all of them and didn't focus on one quite enough to develop it well. Mind you, I enjoyed it, but none of the elements seemed either mature or developed: the comedy collapsed into occasional odd jokes that were mostly skipped over in the American dubbing altogether, the horror was, unlike such movies as Shawn of the Damned, non-functional and in general either not engrossing or threatening enough to really evoke much of a feeling. There were some elements of a Kung-Fu movie within the movie itself, mind you, but I felt that it seemed more of a vehicle to influencing and examining rules on the Vampires themselves, that the kung-fu was only there to remind us "Yes, it's an eastern film." I feel that is they're using kung-fu, there should be some fundamental essence behind it: but, the fact that the grave keepers use kung-fu is neither explained nor would any explanation actually help given the nature of the movie. I suppose the vampire part was reasonably satisfactory, but that part is not nearly convincing enough without any real horror environment. The movie, did, however, create several very entertaining moments, but as a whole it was a disappointment.

Willard was a bit of an odd movie. I'm not sure if I'm but a bitter cynic, but the movie itself didn't speak to me horribly much. The environment that it was held in--that old building-- seemed to require several methods of impetus before any activity would occur, and that unchanging environment stifled it. I understand that a great deal of the movie was to question the relative sanity of Willard, but I felt that basic question, "Was Willard insane, lonely, or both?" was not examined in enough detail to really speak to me. However, at least several parts of the story, including the Cat, and his final struggle against Ben, I felt were very well done and eerie enough to be very touching, even how the timid Cat and Willard both fell in the very same, spread eagled, angelic pose towards the waiting rats, and the almost mystical nature of his silhouette as he murders the force that (Imaginably?) enslaved him. Although not perfect, the movie itself I felt was a successful scary movie in that the 'victim' was a much quieter victim- a person did not need to hear Willard scream to feel fear.

"This is the cost of belonging to you, mother," Ingrid states, dressed in all black and near tears, in front of her mother at the end of the movie. I?ve heard that many people disliked this movie, but for whatever reason--be it the nostalgia from a book that jump-started my, at that time, floundering literary interest (Do not worry, it is fully revived and kicking far stronger than either I or it ever deemed even remotely possible), my enjoyment of the characters entailed, or plain out teenage hormones (In which ever way that may be reasonably interpreted, gentlemen. ), it is impossible for me to say that I dislike this movie as much as those whom I watched it with did. The simple, relatively straightforward narrative lends itself nicely to cinema, and the movie and the book were quite similar. I suppose I simply believed the characters, and that their emotions were deep, real, and actually had managed to illicit some very emotional reactions from me, myself. The environment reflects Ingrid herself: shifting, moving, each seeming all at once foreign and familiar: like a new home. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, although I'm sure a good deal of you are raising a metaphorical golf club in objection
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"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all" (Oscar Wilde)

[beltmann]