The Stop Button

The modern Japanese drama tends to be emotive. Even when they aren’t good, they succeed in making the viewer care for the characters.
Turn is, ostensibly, a Japanese Groundhog Day. Only not funny. Where Groundhog Day was about Bill Murray interacting with people with no consequence, the character stuck in turnover in Turn is alone. She […]

Let me annotate the opening cast crawl with my thoughts at the time….
James Spader–great, love him on “Boston Legal.”
Melora Walters–from Magnolia, love her, she’s in nothing.
Jay Mohr–liked him in Picture Perfect when I saw it, now can’t believe I liked it…
Catherine O’Hara, Bill Murray… solid people.
So what happened? It’s actually not all John McNaughton’s fault, […]

Well, now, I’m surprised. Batman Begins is not terrible.
It’s not good either. Not good at all. It has damning faults in three areas, and since this film is the first critically praised one I’ve thrashed–at least the first critically praised one currently still in the theaters–this post is going to be a little more “formal” […]

I kept getting sad during White Dog, probably for a few reasons. First, the film is effective: it’s about people faced with a reality (a racist training his dog to attack black people) they can’t fix, but they’re going to try. I have a bootleg from Denmark (everyone’s bootleg is from Denmark), but hadn’t watched […]