By now everyone with any interest in cinema knows that A Prairie Home Companion can now be called Robert Altman’s last film. His recent passing and the upcoming Oscar push lead my mind to the strange fascination I have with the “In Memoriam” segment of each year’s show. Those few minutes of the perennially overlong [...]
Entries from December 2006
A Prairie Home Companion
December 18th, 2006 · 1 Comment
Tags: Biographical · Comedy · Director · Drama · Ensemble · Musical
Joyeux Noël
December 17th, 2006 · No Comments
Eggnog. Lights. Carols. And yes, movies. There are many reasons why cinema is a strong part of holiday traditions around the world. And while I’m not suggesting anyone give up his or her staples, I offer for your consideration a new candidate for our smaller and more fragile world: a fictionalized amalgamation of the many [...]
Tags: Drama · Ensemble · Foreign Language · Romance · War
Kinky Boots
December 17th, 2006 · No Comments
Make no mistake, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things, Inside Man, and the upcoming Children of Men) is a tremendously talented actor, and his performance as cross-dressing Lola in this little film based on a real shoe factory in Northampton confirms and reinforces that assessment. Sadly, though, Ejiofor’s performance is about the only thing in Kinky [...]
Dear Wendy
December 17th, 2006 · No Comments
Thomas Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy inhabits a space somewhere between the sublime and pointed absurdity of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the aimless spectacle of the Wachowski brothers‘ V for Vendetta. From a screenplay by Vinterberg’s fellow provocateur, Lars Von Trier, Dear Wendy tells the story of a group of misfits in an surrealistically vintage [...]
The Youth In Us
December 8th, 2006 · No Comments
Every once in while on WTTW’s Image Union (the long-running half-hour short film showcase) you come across a real gem. In this case, the jewel is The Youth In Us, and the good news is, you don’t have to TIVO Image Union (which I recommend) to see it, since director Joshua Leonard has constructed a [...]
Camera
December 5th, 2006 · No Comments
After Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen issued the Dogme 95 manifesto, the strict set of rules meant to inspire and challenge filmmakers to break genre conventions, they would watch films submitted for the Dogme mantle to vote on whether the rules (no artificial light or sound; on location, hand held [...]
Tags: Experimental
Spiffin’ up the ‘Mash
December 3rd, 2006 · 2 Comments
As I (very, very slowly) learn WordPress, CSS, HTML, and other boggling acronyms, a few improvements have been made. Check out the links to the “special” pages, found at the upper corner of any page on the site: ABOUT, LISTS, and 2CB4UDIE (the latter being a subset of the Lists page, and still needing a [...]
Tags: Site News
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
