Capsule Reivews

Bottle Rocket

Wes Anderson makes good movies. This is one of them. Very cool film. Sweet, funny, clever stuff. Anderson’s first feature, Bottle Rocket also introduced a whole slew of Wilsons (the two you know- Owen and Luke- and their brother Andrew- he plays Bob Mapplethorpe’s brother "futureman") That sort of combo can’t be beat.

The Others

Oh jeez. Back-to back, I review films from directors I can’t stop saying nice things about. First Wes Anderson now Alejandro Amenábar. His first Hollywood film (following a trio of outstanding Spanish features), The Others is creepy, suspenseful gem of a film. That’ll do for now, since I’m not exactly alone in voicing a nice opinion of this particular picture.

Waiting for Guffman

This is one of those films that took way too long to see. I wanted to check it out when it was in the theater, I missed it then, and somehow it took me all this time (something like seven years) to actually sit down and watch it. Oh well. Worse things have happened.  Anyway, it’s pretty funny and since I’ve seen this film I like Parker Posey 20% more than I did before. Check it out if you haven’t already.

The Player

I’d forgotten just how much I liked this film. We (meaning the outlaw film-geek posse that I ran with when this film was new) were seriously into this film when it came out. I watched it every couple of months "back in the day" (it seems that way at least) and some phrases from it even made their way into my day-to-day vocabulary ("because that’s  the reality" being the most notorious. ) That said, before I watched it recently, I hadn’t seen it in seven or eight years. With that much of a lag between viewings it turned out to be even more enjoyable than excepted to revisit this Robert Altman classic. As you would imagine, I gained new perspectives on it and was reintroduced to elements that I’d forgotten. Adding that to simply revisiting the stuff that I knew (the great casting, the perfect-but-evil skewering of Hollywood, the clever story, etc.) made this one of the best cinematic experiences of the year so far for me.

Bonnie and Clyde

Finally got around to seeing this. It’s pretty good. Bloody.

I didn’t miss the humor of Warren Beatty playing the sexually dysfunctional Clyde Barrow, by the way.

While the DVD was in the house, I couldn’t stop singing Desmond Dekker, but other than that I don’t have any complaints. 

Dogtown and Z-Boys

I skated for years, so I had a special interest in this film, but beyond that, this documentary from Stacey Peralta is a successful, interesting look at modern skate boarding’s true formative years. It’s stories like this that make documentary a vibrant format. Featuring a lively cast of characters, a hip subject and plenty of super-cool archival footage, Dogtown and Z-Boys delivers pretty much everything I was looking for going in.