From My Collection: Kill Bill Volume 1 Movie Review

It always felt like Kill Bill needed to be taken as a single four hour movie rather than the two individual parts it was broken into. That seems obvious, right? It’s one story. It was conceived as one film and split up for marketing reasons. But not every multi-part film series necessarily has to be taken as one shot. As incomplete as any one of the Lord of the Rings films is, they can each be taken as films unto themselves individually. Kill Bill Volume 1 feels unfinished in a way that no other “first part” film has ever felt to me, and it all makes a lot more sense after seeing Kill Bill Volume 2.

Important Anniversaries Marked in 2013

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From My Collection - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Movie Review

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy must pack so much into those novels that it’s a minor miracle they were ever made into successful films. I’ve never read the books, of course, but you get a sense by the third installment of director Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy of adaptations that the final book is replete with an abundance of minor and secondary characters all requiring a closing to their arcs. The effect is a film that is bloated and overblown, but at the same time a visual wallop and a great piece of entertainment filmmaking.

Freddy vs. Jason Movie Review

Like with Jason X, this one shouldn't even be included in this October series but for a sense of completion with bothNightmare and Friday. How could I not include it? I have it noted that I saw this in the theater, but I have no memory of that whatsoever. It was released in theaters a week before I left on a three month backpacking trip. I find it hard to believe it was still in theaters when I returned. And I doubt I would have rushed out to see it while I was preparing for such a big trip.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

I wonder how long after acquiring the rights to Friday the 13^th it took New Line executives to start fantasizing a combination movie with A Nightmare on Elm Street. It took more than ten years to finally get Freddy vs. Jason into production and then released. Was it worth the wait? Does the end result provide those who were clamoring for the ultimate confrontation of 80s horror icons with a showdown worthy of the classic status of something like Godzilla vs. Mothra? I’m not so sure.

Whale Rider Movie Review

It always strikes me that there’s a special affinity between the American west and the lands down under of Australia and New Zealand. I noticed it especially a few years ago after watching Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli in succession. The openness of the land, the sense of adventure in the Outback and the feeling of leaping into the unknown can all be thematically linked to the western genre. Recently, while watching Niki Caro’s 2003 film Whale Rider I discovered that there are links to be found also between New Zealand and the history of America.

L'Auberge espagnole Movie Review

It takes a certain personality type to leave one’s home country to spend a year in a foreign place. It takes an even different type to make the most of the experience and truly enjoy it. I moved to Spain when I was 27 and I remained there for five and a half years. What made me want to get away in the first place? Since I was a teenager I knew I wanted to travel and see the world. I never imagined myself tied to one location for too long a time. Others come into the experience in a different way. I felt myself pulled toward living abroad. Other people do it because they think it’s something they should do or because they think it will enrich them personally or professionally. But those who come out the other end feeling like it was the best time of their lives share some intrinsic quality that is open to outside opinions and ways of living.

Xavier (Romain Duris) is a French university student in L’Auberge espagnole, and in the beginning he doesn’t know what he’s in for. But at the end he comes out a whole new person. It is this film more than many other things that helped push me toward a life in Spain. Hoping to get a cushy government job after finishing his degree in economics, his future boss encourages him to spend an Erasmus year in Spain to learn Spanish and get some cultural perspective. With a few editing and camera flourishes, director Cedric Klapisch (who also wrote the screenplay) whisks us quickly through the lengthy process Xavier must go through to study in Barcelona.

Love Actually Movie Review: A New Perennial Christmas Classic

Released in the United States one week after Elf, a film I think should become a holiday classic, Love Actually warmed audiences' hearts and for many has become perennial viewing at this time of year. It’s easy to see why as I found it thoroughly enjoyable in the cinema in November, 2003, and still find it emotionally fulfilling eight years later. At the time I might have written it off as high-end fluff that I fell for at a time when I was returning from the emotional high of three months backpacking Europe, a trip during which I saw London for the first time. So watching the movie, I experienced nostalgic excitement over seeing that skyline again, for recognizing Heathrow airport, for hearing those London accents. It turns out, however, that the film has a lot more to offer. It has staying power built on a witty script by Richard Curtis, who also directs with a light touch, keeping more than a dozen major characters suspended over two hours bringing everyone’s story into resolve in the final scenes and brief coda.

Elf Movie Review: A Modern Christmas Classic

Jon Favreau wanted his Christmas comedy Elf to become a Christmas classic. Actually I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t yet. It has all the elements needed to establish it firmly in the canon. The reason I say Favreau wanted that is because it looks like he went out of his way to give it the look and feel of other classic holiday fare from both film and television. In this unusual and often uproarious story of a human raised by North Pole elves who goes to New York City seeking out his real father, Favreau’s direction keeps the comedy coming at consistent intervals while also injecting the right amount of sentiment. He never pushes the sappy stuff too hard, but it’s strong enough to give you a good feeling. David Berenbaum’s screenplay deserves credit for the straightforward plotting, some damn good jokes and an appropriate level of holiday spiritedness.

John Cusack focus concludes with Review of Identity

It can be a really effective premise to confine your characters to a single location fort eh duration of the drama. The ancient Greeks were certainly aware of this as a narrative device. It can work best in a thriller and there are many that throw a bunch of people together for a single night and then dispatch them one by one.

James Mangold’s Identity starts eerily and mysteriously with newspaper clippings of a motel murder and voiceover recordings of a psychiatrist (Alfred Molina) talking to the alleged perpetrator. Then suddenly we’re thrust into a motel office as a man bursts in holding his bleeding wife shouting at the clerk to call an ambulance. Then in overlapping flashbacks we see the sequence of events, involving a young call girl, a limousine driver and an aging movie star, and a young boy who never speaks, that led to the accident. Because of a terrible rain storm that has washed out the road in both directions, all these characters and more wind up at the motel together.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico Movie Review

The third film in Robert Rodríguez’s “Mariachi” trilogy takes its title, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, as an homage to Sergio Leone. The title reputedly suggested by friend Quentin Tarantino, who told him that this was his “Dollars” trilogy (in reference to Leone’s three spaghetti westerns featuring Clint Eastwood, the third of which is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and in which Once Upon a Time in the West plays no part). None of that matters, though, because Rodríguez and Tarantino love to riff on the culture of coolness. They love being in the know and they love to throw little tidbits in for their fans who are also ‘in the know’.

Stuck on You Movie Review

This review was first written and published in December 2003 on a website that no longer exists. The unusual structure is a remnant of that site's requirements.

Synopsis: Bob and Walt Tenor (Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear) are conjoined twins who own a burger joint on Martha’s Vineyard. Walt moonlights as a local stage actor, performing in an annual one-man show for which he wins praise from all his friends.  But he has dreams of becoming a real Hollywood actor and persuades Bob to leave their life on the Vineyard.  Very shortly after arriving in Hollywood, Walt strikes it big in a starring role opposite Cher in a hit TV series.  Eventually Walt’s and Bob’s life becomes too complicated for them to stick together any longer.

Scoop: The Farrelly brothers have a great knack for skewering all groups of people in the most un-PC ways they can find.  For these guys, nothing seems to be off limits.  Their targets have included mentally disabled persons, schizophrenics, the Amish, the obese, people with various physical disabilities and now they’ve finally arrived at conjoined twins.

The Last Samurai Movie Review

This review was first written and published in December 2003 on a website that no longer exists. The unusual structure is a remnant of that site's requirements.

Synopsis: Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is a war hero who served under General Custer. He is offered the opportunity to travel to Japan to train the Imperial Army so they may successfully put down a rebellion of samurai warriors. The US Government stands to get a lucrative weapons contract out of the deal. When the ill-prepared Japanese soldiers are hastily sent into battle, the samurai handily defeat them, taking Algren as their prisoner after demonstrating his fearsome fighting capabilities while fending off five or six samurai. He spends the winter months in a small village in the mountains learning the ways of Japanese culture and training as a samurai. In the spring he returns to Tokyo and his own commanding officer to find that his loyalties lie with the villagers with whom he has developed a strong bond. Algren chooses to side with his principles and to fight with the samurai against the invasion of the US-backed Japanese military.

Scoop: A film like The Last Samurai risks criticism for making a white man the emotional center of a story about Japanese warriors. If this were a story about a white man who leads the helpless samurai, through the use of his Western knowledge, to a tremendous victory against the invaders, then such criticism might be valid. But director Edward Zwick and screenwriter John Logan have made a film about an American soldier who has lost himself at home and is saved by a culture he finds to be right, pure and honorable.

Top Ten of 2003

This list was made in early 2004, but posted on 17 April 2014 and backdated to 1 January 2004.

1. Lost in Translation dir. Sofia Coppola

2. Cidade de Deus (City of God) dir. Fernando Meirelles

3. Mystic River dir. Clint Eastwood

4. The Fog of War dir. Errol Morris

5. Whale Rider dir. Niki Caro

6. Capturing the Friedmans dir. Andrew Jarecki

7. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World dir. Peter Weir

8. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King dir. Peter Jackson

9. Les Triplettes de Belleville (The Triplets of Belleville) dir. Sylvain Chomet

10. Winged Migration dir. Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats, Jacques Perrin

All feature films seen from 2003 (based on US commercial release dates)

* review available on this site

+ from my collection
^ not released in the US

titles in bold received at least one Oscar nomination

21 Grams dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu

+28 Days Later... dir. Danny Boyle

American Splendor dir. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

American Wedding dir. Jesse Dylan

Anger Management dir. Peter Segal

Anything Else dir. Woody Allen

L'Auberge Espagnol dir. Cedric Klapisch

Bad Santa dir. Terry Zwigoff

The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions barbares) dir. Denys Arcand

Bend It Like Beckham dir. Gurinder Chadha

Better Luck Tomorrow dir. Justin Lin

Big Fish dir. Tim Burton

Bruce Almighty dir. Tom Shadyac

Capturing the Friedmans dir. Andrew Jarecki

Casa de los Babys dir. John Sayles

City of God (Cidade de Deus) dir. Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund

Cold Mountain dir. Anthony Minghella

Confidence dir. James Foley

The Cooler dir. Wayne Kramer

Daredevil dir. Mark Steven Johnson

^Días de fútbol dir. David Serrano

Dirty Pretty Things dir. Stephen Frears

Dummy dir. Greg Pritikin

Elephant dir. Gus Van Sant

+Elf dir. Jon Favreau

Final Destination 2 dir. David R. Ellis

Finding Nemo dir. Andrew Stanton

The Fog of War dir. Errol Morris

Freddy vs. Jason dir. Ronny Yu

Girl with a Pearl Earring dir. Peter Webber

The Good Thief dir. Neil Jordan

House of Sand and Fog dir. Vadim Perelman

Hulk dir. Ang Lee

*Identity dir. James Mangold

In America dir. Jim Sheridan

In the Cut dir. Jane Campion

+Intolerable Cruelty dir. Joel Coen

+The Italian Job dir. F. Gary Gray

Just Married dir. Shawn Levy

+*Kill Bill: Volume 1 dir. Quentin Tarantino

*The Last Samurai dir. Edward Zwick

The Life of David Gale dir. Alan Parker

Lilja 4-ever dir. Lukas Moodyson

+*The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King dir. Peter Jackson

Lost in Translation dir. Sofia Coppola

*Love, Actually dir. Richard Curtis

Love Liza dir. Todd Louiso

Los Lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun) dir. Fernando León de Aranoa

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World dir. Peter Weir

Matchstick Men dir. Ridley Scott

The Matrix Reloaded dir. Lana and Andy Wachowski

The Matrix Revolutions dir. Lana and Andy Wachowski

A Mighty Wind dir. Christopher Guest

Monster dir. Patty Jenkins

+My Life Without Me dir. Isabel Coixet

Mystic River dir. Clint Eastwood

Old School dir. Todd Phillips

+*Once Upon a Time in Mexico dir. Robert Rodriguez

Open Range dir. Kevin Costner
El Otro lado de la cama dir. Emilio Martínez Lázaro

Out of Time dir. Carl Franklin

Owning Mahowny dir. Richard Kwietniowski

Phone Booth dir. Joel Schumacher

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl dir. Gore Verbinski

The Recruit dir. Roger Donaldson

S.W.A.T. dir. Clark Johnson

School of Rock dir. Richard Linklater

Seabiscuit dir. Gary Ross

Shanghai Knights dir. David Dobkin

Shattered Glass dir. Billy Ray

Something's Gotta Give dir. Nancy Meyer

Stuck on You dir. Peter and Bobby Farrelly

Swimming Pool dir. Francois Ozon

Thirteen dir. Catherine Hardwicke

Touching the Void dir. Kevin MacDonald

The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplette de Belleville) dir. Sylvain Chomet

Tupac: Resurrection dir. Lauren Lazin

Under the Tuscan Sun dir. Audrey Wells

Veronica Guerin dir. Joel Schumacher

*Whale Rider Niki Caro

Winged Migration dir. Jacuqes Perrin, Jacuqe Cluzaud, Miche Debats

X2 dir. Bryan Singer

XX/XY dir. Austin Chick