Movies: May 2008 Archives
May 29, 2024
The story was strangely fascinating for people who follow weird-news sources like Romenesko's Obscure Store and Reading Room: a woman driving at night had struck a homeless pedestrian with such force that he tumbled headlong over the hood of the car and straight through the windshield so that his body slumped across the dashboard, impaled on the shattered glass underneath it. Amazingly, the woman kept driving. She drove all the way home and stashed the car in her garage, where she left him to bleed for death. (Authorities said that if the woman had sought help after the accident, he probably would have lived.) Finally, she sought the help of friends to dispose of the body and ruined, blood-stained car.
Continue reading Stuck (2007).
May 8, 2024
After giving Iron Man a pass, critics generally seem to have knives out for Speed Racer, despite the fact that Speed boasts the most radical visual strategies seen in a movie theater since Sin City, and maybe longer. Yes, of course "unconventional" is not equivalent to "excellent" or even "interesting," and I guess I can understand why you might not want to let the Wachowskis play your optic nerve like a Jew's harp for more than two hours in a sitting. But, man, if you value a little razzle with your dazzle, this one delivers a lot more of that stuff than, say, Iron Man.
Continue reading Speed Racer (2008).
May 5, 2024
Flight of the Red Balloon is one of
those movies where nothing much happens. It's a simple, relatively
peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first
time. Hou's starting point--dictated by Paris's Musee d'Orsay, which commissioned the film--is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956
Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of
Paris, a floating red balloon.
Continue reading Flight of the Red Balloon (2007).
May 2, 2024
When I read Glenn Kenny's line about Iron Man being, essentially, the best Marvel superhero movie to date, I have to admit: it pissed me off. Or, at least, Kenny pissed all over the Spider-Man fanboy inside me. But movie critics are all standing in line to carry Iron Man's jock, so what do I know?
Continue reading Iron Man (2008).