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It’s alive! Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, known in the art world for his collage film Decasia, stitches together a patchwork of old nitrate films in Spark of Being, a 2010 homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Each sequence in the...
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I only saw a portion of the films featured at SIFF 2010 (cursed day job!), but will that stop me from handing out Golden Tank Top Awards to my favorites?
Of course not.
Best Supporting ActorJohn Hawkes, Winter’s Bone (below). The chilliest...
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The film Cargo appears to be scary as hell. It has all the great accoutrement of a sci-fi horror, but its follow through is a let down.
In space no one can hear you complain about corporate irresponsibility....actually, they can.
The film...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
Neil Jordan’s Ondine is presented as modern fairy tale of a man, Syracuse (Colin Farrell), who finds a selkie, Ondine (Alicja Bachleda), in his fishing nets. His daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), teaches...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
The SIFF volunteers at the Egyptian had to shoehorn in all the poetry lovers who wanted to see Allen Ginsberg’s Howl immortalized on screen. Cheek by jowl, we watched as James Franco did his best Ginsberg...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
Not all of us know our fathers from the distant sound of his gun going off, but Llewellyn Karena says, “that’s Dad!” after hearing the crack of a rifle in the first scene of This Way of Life.
When Peter...
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The 1999 release of the three-CD magnum opus 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields brought a wealth of critical and commercial attention for the band's principal songwriter Stephin Merritt. As well, Merritt began to receive a variety of...
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Before the screening of The Wild Hunt, director Aleandre Franchi described his motivation for making the film as a rejection of modern cinematic mythology, wherein heroes are perfect beings "out of touch with the human condition," in...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
You never know when you’re going to walk into a slick Hollywood movie made in Norway but that’s what happened with Sara Johnsen’s Upperdog. While it may seem disappointing to see standard fare romantic comedy...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
The rapidity with which we become acquainted with Andrew Ramaglia’s stomach bile and mucus is a sign of things to come in Joe Mitacek’s Morning.
Ramaglia plays Mike Hade (one letter away from hell!), a man for...
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White Tank Top is a West Side Story-Virgin No More
I’m now convinced that West Side Story is the second best update of Romeo and Juliet ever (the first is, of course, Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”).
If only I hadn’t watched the...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
One obese character sums up the strange propulsion of this black comedy succinctly: "I love being fat and naked."
Here's a snapshot of the principal characters: Enrique is a failed, bisexual pitchman for weight...
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Edward Norton in Leaves of Grass
Edward Norton's bouncing back from his post-Hulk funk!
He'll take home the SIFF Golden Space Needle this month, and he plays an Ivy League prof and his own evil twin in Tim Blake Nelson's new Leaves...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
I like works of art on a grand scale and artists that put everything into achieving greatness. Thus, I sympathize with those ambitious works that will never be completed.
In literature I mourn Scott...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
As I pondered whether I was experiencing the worst Memorial Day weekend weather of all time, it cheered me yesterday to know I was going to see a documentary about Brazil, where it was undoubtedly warm and...
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A White Tank Top Movie Review
“Senso means ‘sense’ in Italian,” the woman next to me told her friend. My own research indicates that senso might also be translated as “sentiment,” which would be closer to the feeling of Luchino...
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White Tank Top Learns to Stay Off That Dirt Road (and Not Mess with Serious SIFF-goers)
I knew Winter’s Bone was going to be a pretty big deal when I saw the SIFF movie-going pros waiting in front of the Egyptian. Their elbows looked sharp...
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This movie is lousy with Oscar nominees: director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies, Breaker Morant) and writer Jan Sardi (Shine, The Notebook). I wish it were like Breaker Morant and Shine, whose story it resembles a bit...
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The writing/directing debut of Viennese Feo Aladag is the most engaging tale of oppressed Muslim women I’ve seen since Panar Jahafi’s The Circle.
But instead of an inside Iranian story filmed by an oppressed and imprisoned director, Aladag...
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Some people will fall in love with 11-year-old Paloma, the rich Paris girl who dispassionately plans to kill herself on her twelfth birthday in The Hedgehog, a sprightly, contrived film derived from the bestselling novel The Elegance of the...
