I didn’t even know how to pronounce the title. It could’ve been “The cider house-rules,” meaning “This is the cider house, and these are the rules.” Or it could’ve been “The cider house rules!” meaning “That cider house is damn cool!” Wiser readers have probably already figured out that the former is correct, and while […]
It’s been a while since I’ve anticipated a film this greatly and been let down so much by the actual product. Filmed from Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor’s extremely entertaining script, Citizen Ruth had a lot to live up to. Of course, in some ways, it does, and in some, it doesn’t. Geez, you’d think
The long awaited follow up to Delicatessen is another surrealist adventure into the questionably sane minds of French creators Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. It’s been four years since that film, and their new picture, The City of Lost Children, is twice as strange and almost as good. A twist on the typical fairy tale,
The line of reasoning goes like this: George Bush is an idiot, yet he’s now happily perched in the White House the only reason he’s there has to be the dark, Svengali-like figure who’s masterminded his rise to power, Karl Rove. This theory is posed in the opening scene of the nervy documentary Bush’s Brain,
In the press materials for his new film The Business of Fancydancing, writer/director Sherman Alexie calls making the movie cheaply and with every crew member sharing in the profits “a tribal collaboration of art and capital.” After seeing it I call this an extraordinary act of generosity. No auteur is an island, but in The
Take director John Waters and give him a really good actress like Natasha Lyonne, a paltry budget of, say, $1 million, and ask him to make a satire about a “gay rehab camp,” and you might come up with something like But I’m a Cheerleader. Then again, Waters might have come up with something funny,
There once was a time in movie history when party-hardy kids would head into the woods and get their heads bashed in by some masked psycho. Ah, the good old days. Writer director Eli Roth remembers that time fondly with his no-apologies, balls to the wall, blood-splattering thriller that recalls a time when Leatherface massacred
Let me tell you a story. A few years ago (I won’t say exactly how long) I happened upon a guy (I won’t say his name) who lived across the street from me. Rather quickly and inexplicably he developed a strange obsession with me. One might even say he was sociopathic. A good, long year
Nigel Cole’s empowering Calendar Girls calls to mind Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty, though not just because it’s about nude British people who have no business being in their birthday suits. Both imports work from simple one-line premises centered around the fundraising efforts of a cheeky lead (here it’s Helen Mirren, while there it was
One weekday morning in 1982, several boys in my fourth grade class, including yours truly, suddenly fell ill and needed to go home from school. Teachers feared an epidemic, and they were right. We had The Cannonball Run fever, and the only cure was not missing its debut on pay cable. The next day in
