2008 May | Coosa Creek Cinema

Holly Hunter Time

By Rick, on May 31st, 2008 |

It’s Holly Hunter time, all the time, over at Variety. In something called “Holly Hunter: Profile in Excellence” you will find five — count ‘em: five! – articles on the Georgia-born actress. There’s a piece on her TV show Saving Grace, one on how her career got jump-started via a meeting in an [...]

Short Take: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

By Rick, on May 30th, 2008 |

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

Direction: Julian Schnabel
Screenplay: Ronald Harwood
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski
Editing: Juliette Welfling

I resisted seeing this for a time, because it just didn’t seem like a story that I would like. Despite all the reviews to the contrary, it seemed gimmicky — a film from the point-of-view (POV) of a paralytic man, a [...]

Short Take: Election

By Rick, on May 29th, 2008 |

Election (2005)

Director: Johnny To;
Cinematograper: Siu-keung Cheng;
Editor: Patrick Tam

Note: this is a new feature here at the Creek, covering films I love but don’t have time (or I’m just too lazy) to write about in a full-length review.

This predecessor to 2006’s Triad Election (which I reviewed here) chronicles the rise to power of [...]

Sydney Pollack, 1934 – 2008

By Rick, on May 27th, 2008 |

Sydney Pollack, prolific actor, producer and director, died yesterday of cancer. Best known to the public in recent years as an actor, he often played affable executives with a core of steel underneath. He was director of such films as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Way We [...]

May the Farce be With You

By Rick, on May 26th, 2008 |

Speaking of blockbusters (and isn’t everyone these days?), D.J. Siegelbaum interviewed Daniel Jones (one of the guys on the right), co-founder of a religion based on the other Franchise That Destroyed Cinema. Siegelbaum writes:

May 25th marks the 31st anniversary of the movie megalith Star Wars. In three decades the franchise has spawned [...]

Thoughts on the Return of Indiana Jones

By Rick, on May 25th, 2008 |

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull yesterday, and I can’t say that it was bad. I enjoyed much of it: in fact, the entire first sequence was more pure, unadulterated fun than I’ve had in the movies in a while. From the point when the Paramount mountain [...]

Scenes from a Holdup

By Rick, on May 24th, 2008 |

The first thing you notice about Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is how drop-dead gorgeous it is. A wheatfield glows in the twilight; light dapples through an alder wood, granting halos to two-bit thugs; a grassfire splits the night, like an open gateway to [...]

La Bête Humaine

By Rick, on May 22nd, 2008 |

What can I say about Jean Renoir? In my humble opinion, he is perhaps the best that ever was, if you discount, Kurosawa or Fellini or Bergman or . . . ok, ok, so I’m not ready to pronounce him the greatest, but based on his output before 1940, he’d have to be [...]

Coosa Creek Times, 5-19-2008

By Rick, on May 19th, 2008 |

Fernando Meirelles’ Blindnes, a film I’ve been looking forward to, opened the Cannes film festival last week, and the reviews have been mixed. Dave McCoy of MSN movies doesn’t particularly care for it:

What could have been a creepy, intelligent horror/drama is essentially stripped of any humanity and humility because Meirelles [...]

DVD Spotlight: The Killers

By Rick, on May 18th, 2008 |

This Criterion DVD represents a rare opportunity to compare multiple screen adaptations of the same story: Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers. There are three adaptations on this two-disc set: Robert Siodmak’s 1946 Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1958 student film entitled simply The Killers, and Don Siegel’s 1964 adaptation, originally slated to be the [...]