I’m not all that familiar with Clouzot, or maybe I am. I’ve seen Wages of Fear and Diabolique. I didn’t even know The Spies was one of his, I was just queuing a Peter Ustinov spy movie. Apparently, Topkapi didn’t teach me anything.
I’m kidding. About The Spies, not about Topkapi. Topkapi is pretty shitty. The […]
Entries from August 2005
The Spies (1957, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
August 15th, 2005 No Comments
Recommend on MahaloClean (2004, Olivier Assayas)
August 14th, 2005 No Comments
Clean answers a number of burning questions. Burning to someone, just not me.
1) Olivier Assayas is an excellent director.
2) Olivier Assayas is a terrible writer.
3) Maggie Cheung cannot act in English.
4) Maggie Cheung cannot sing in English.
5) Nick Nolte can survive anything.
I was surprised by numbers 1 and 3. Not so much by the rest.
After […]
Versus (2000, Kitamura Ryuhei), the director’s cut
August 13th, 2005 No Comments
So, watching Versus, I realized a few things. First, Kitamura is probably the best action director… ever. Second, he can’t write his way out of a hat. Third, he’s also a great director of actors. Versus, for the superior first forty minutes, has a lot of characters in frame, doing a lot of things, not […]
Olga’s Chignon (2002, Jérôme Bonnell)
August 13th, 2005 No Comments
I think this film is the one of the best films Woody Allen never made.
I don’t talk about it much, or ever, since I watched all of Allen’s films long before the Stop Button, but there are some distinct Allen formats and he never seems to mix them. Olga’s Chignon mixes them a little–it’s never […]
Sea of Love (1989, Harold Becker)
August 10th, 2005 No Comments
So, I was worried about Sea of Love. After all, the last movie Richard Price is credited with writing is Shaft (though I realize it was changed from what he wrote by Singleton, who’s just a screenwriting dynamo). So, I was worried. Sea of Love was a film I loved–absolutely loved–when I first got into […]
Safety Last! (1923, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)
August 6th, 2005 No Comments
Film used to be a visual medium. It’s an audio/visual now and getting more and more audio–Dolby Digital and DTS has convinced folks they need five speakers plus the discreet (while Woody Allen still shoots mono). Film has become stage-less theater (without the pretension of theater), but it wasn’t always that way….
I’ve never seen a […]
