You’ve probably seen the news about South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius being disqualified from Olympic competition for using cheetah prosthetic legs, which give him an unnatural advantage over naturally-limbed runners. What you may not know is that this controversy was preempted by a September 2007 episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, one of my favourite TV shows.
The director of the 129th minute of the director’s cut of King Arthur is Antoine Fuqua, who was also responsible for Training Day and fuck all else worth mentioning, either before or since. While Denzel Washington’s portrayal of a badass, out of control cop in Training Day was kind of scary, he had nothing on Keira “Choppers” Knightley’s take on Guinevere in this 2004 shocker.
John Ralston Saul made a huge impact on me a couple of years ago when I read his masterpiece of social philosophy Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. One of the things that struck me about it was the enormous breadth of subject matter; it was full of philosophy, politics, economics, art theory, you name it. In contrast, page 114 of The Collapse of Globalism (and the reinvention of the world) has a very narrow scope, and has a hard time standing up against Saul’s better work.
This moody, dark and wordless minute opens with the film’s main character, Trelkovsky, solemnly contemplating his visage in a mirror. Trelkovsky is played by Roman Polanski, who also wrote and directed this minutes of Le Locataire in 1976. These first reflective seconds compel the viewer to follow Polanski’s lead, and take a good look at what is in front of them; indeed this is a minute of film that deserves close examination.
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Watchmen is the latest Alan Moore (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, V for Vendetta) comic to be adapted for the big screen, with 300’s Zac Synder directing and a release slated for 2009. One of the most intense pages in the entire premier issue (drawn by artist Dave Gibbons) is page 24, which relates an entry in “Rorshach’s Journal” from October 1985.
Kauas pilvet karkaavat (1996) is the first film in Aki Kaurismäki’s poignantly comic Finland Trilogy, and its forty-eighth minute is probably the thirty-fourth best minute in a field of ninety six. It opens in a bleak office of an employment agent, a shot framed expertly by cinematographer Timo Salminen. Our protagonist Ilona, portrayed by Kati Outinen (who is superb in this and many other minutes of the film), faces the employment agent and says “I’m interested in anything”. Immediately I’m captured, wondering just how far she’ll go.
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According to the IMDB, 1949’s The Third Man is the 48th highest rated movie of all time. Rotten Tomatoes tells me that its 100% something and 8.3/10 for something else. I’m pretty sure one of those numbers refers to critics’ reviews, probably. These scores confirm the stupidity and poor taste of the vast bulk of humans and critics alike. After reading several of the many hundreds of glowing, adoring reviews available on the internet (thanks to its notoriously non-existent quality control system), I was excited and agog; ready to watch a movie that is “one of the great motion pictures of all time“, “an undisputed masterpiece” and “one of the greatest expressions of the noir attitude ever committed to film”. In retrospect, I’m a little peeved that nobody had thought to use any of the phrases that came to my mind as I watched: overrated, boring, predictable, crap.
Anyone can make cheese and toast work in harmony, but it takes a pretty special chef to make bacon icecream. Likewise, anyone can make explosions and Clive Owen work together, but it takes the genius of François Truffaut to make comedy and film noir blend as seamlessly and naturally as they do in “Vivement Dimanche!“. Released in 1983, this was titled “Confidentially Yours” for its American release, although the literal translation is “Finally Sunday!”. The screenplay was Truffaut’s own adaptation of Charles Williams’s novel “The Long Saturday Night”.
When university broke up for the long break a couple of months ago, I suddenly found myself with a whole lot of time on my hands, and not a lot of money. Over the next few days I found myself randomly downloading television episodes, looking for something new to occupy myself with. After a few really poor choices, I found myself watching the first episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, which was thirteen episodes into its third season in the US by the time I found it. After watching that one episode, I was hooked, and caught up so fast I was waiting a couple of days for the fourteenth and final episode of the series to air.
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