If anything ramps up in February, it’s a focus on romance with Valentine’s hearts popping up like early crocuses and a focus on high-end movies as the Academy Awards season is in full swing. With those things percolating around my brain, I’ve been thinking about one of the better films I saw last year, Before…
Last week, I was blissfully unaware that a giant sinkhole could open up underneath my house and kill me while I was watching tv. But does that mean that I was blissfully ignorant of danger? Not at all. Last week, I was thinking about the possibility that something from the sky could crash into my…
As you might expect, our theme for October (yes, I’m just getting to October) was horror movies. And I thought three of them made an interesting evolutionary trio: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and The Cabin In The Woods. Now to me, Halloween represents that rare thing in Hollywood – an original and well-executed idea. I…
When A Room With A View premiered in 1986 the first digit of my age had just turned to a “2” and there was absolutely zero chance that I would have gone to see it in a theater. Zero. Zip. Nada. I can guarantee you that I would have just gone to see Aliens again instead.…
One common conversation among bibliophiles is how film adaptations so often fail to live up to the books from which they are derived. Words like “depth”, “nuance”, and “characterization” are usually included in any comparison, with the film nearly always on the short end. So, it was with some interest that our Flick Buddies topic…
The granddaddy of all science fiction films is, I think, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In its classic opening sequence, we see an alien object trigger an evolution in early hominids (the use of tools-as-weapons) and later another evolution that propels man (in this case Bowman, the astronaut) to another level of consciousness/existence. It’s…
Sometimes when people get depressed and they give into a little drama and hyperbole, they will often say that their world is ending. As it turns out, Lars Von Trier’s spectacularly beautiful 2011 film Melancholia is a remarkable meditation on depression AND the end of the world. Melancholia follows the story of the manic depressive…
This is always an interesting time of year for film watchers and fans because a lot of critics are choosing their “Best Of” lists and various industry awards are putting out their nominees – e.g. this week both the SAG and Golden Globe Awards nominees were announced, leading up to the granddaddy Oscar nominations next…
Have you ever had a variant of this conversation with a friend or family member? You: I met So-And-So for lunch today. FFM: Who’s that? An old classmate? You: No. They’re a blog friend. FFM: A what? You: A blog friend. You know, someone you met through the internet. FFM: Are you doing eHarmony?!?! You:…
This past weekend, the Beloved and I went to see the new natural disaster film Contagion. Natural disaster film, you say? Absolutely. Much more so than any of the crap that Roland Emmerich’s been churning out (2012, The Day After Tomorrow), Steven Soderbergh’s thriller has a decidedly realistic feeling – so much sometimes so that…
Stevil 