Analysis & Commentary and News Rick on 31 May 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 Rick on 30 May 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 Rick on 29 May 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 [...]
News Rick on 27 May 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 [...]
News Rick on 26 May 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 more than [...]
Review Rick on 25 May 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 [...]
Analysis & Commentary Rick on 24 May 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 the netherworld. [...]
Jean Renoir and Review Rick on 22 May 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 [...]
News Rick on 19 May 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 chose to populate his [...]
DVDs and Review Rick on 18 May 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 [...]
RSS 2.0
