Cinema Mishmash

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One of the nicest things about a film festival is the surprise delight, if you are bold enough to take a chance on a film and lucky enough for it to pay off. Not that choosing The Girl on the Train as the first film to see at the Chicago International Film Festival was that big [...]

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I’m just going to come out and say it: there isn’t enough going on in Scoop to justify it’s existence to anyone but die hard Woody Allen completists. Admittedly I have a love/hate reaction to Allen’s work. There is no doubt that he is a supremely gifted filmmaker, but Scoop is another example of his [...]

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Rocket Science is a film which piqued my attention since it’s release, based on it’s comparison’s to Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Dollhouse. Turns out that that my unintentional avoidance of the film over the past two years merely delayed by disappointment: the aforementioned films might qualify as inspirations, but certainly [...]

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How often do you get the chance to see a film made once of video (in 1982) and then again in film (in 1996)? (Okay, El Mariachi and Desparado don’t count.) A friend lent us a copy of Larry Fessenden’s Habit (the 1996 version) and thereby introduced me to a film and filmmaker of whom [...]

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Comic actors, like comedies themselves, suffer eternally from being underestimated. The assumption is that actors whose work is primarily, or initially, dominated by light-hearted material must be naturally funny rather than talented. And while that observation might ring true for some portion of the comedic actors who’ve actually been given a decent chance to break [...]

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Some have credited producer/writer/director Judd Apatow as a power transforming (or reinvigorating) cinematic comedy. However, I can’t reconcile a film like Superbad with a good number of the films that bear the Apatow mantle. (Not just  Step Brothers, which I’ve recently suffered. Take a look at his producer resume, there are some marginal and poor [...]

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