tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101670492008-08-25T11:59:19.193-06:00DPnoreply@blogger.comBlogger94125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-11080429226570050902008-08-25T11:57:00.000-06:002008-08-25T11:59:19.212-06:00

Though it's not the greatest film in the world, it never pretends to be that way either. It's a romantic comedy you may have seen thousands of times before and the style can be quite pedestrian. In spite of these minor imperfections, "No Reservations" still has plenty to offer in its genre and it exceeds in many levels that the average romantic comedy has failed over the years. Catherine

DPnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-37147003127732974362008-08-13T00:16:00.003-06:002008-08-14T06:53:11.041-06:00

Mongol has been out in film festivals for some time and saw limited release last year, even picking up an Academy Award nom (Best Foreign Film), but just recently found its way to my local arthouse theatre. The movie tells the story of a young Genghis Khan, the great 12-century Mongolian warlord. Admittedly, this is history with an asterisk. Most of the story is based on The Secret History

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-65337370278613685362008-06-30T22:34:00.003-06:002008-06-30T22:39:02.884-06:00

Ever since I saw the trailer a few months ago, I have wanted to see the documentary Young at Heart. So the other night we headed to our local arthouse theater The Broadway and were treated to one of the more entertaining documentaries I have ever seen. Young at Heart is a geriatric rock 'n roll singing group out of Northampton, Massachusetts which you've got to see (and hear) to believe. Really

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-18452418478020210622008-02-08T09:38:00.000-07:002008-02-08T09:40:18.842-07:00

DPnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-27811888771700403812008-01-30T01:08:00.000-07:002008-02-01T23:54:00.101-07:00

The two questions I’m always asked after Sundance: 1. What did you see that you liked? ★ ★ ★ ★ The Visitor ★ ★ ★ ★ Diminished Capacity ★ ★ ★ ★ Transsiberian ★ ★ ★ ★ A Raisin in the Sun ★ ★ ★ ★ Birds of America ★ ★ ★ Made in America ★ ★ ★ The Merry Gentleman ★ ★ ★ The Deal ★ ★ ★ U2 3D ★ ★ ★ Henry Poole is Here ★ ★ ★ The Yellow Handkerchief ★ ★ ★ Red ★ ★ ★ CSNY Déjà Vu ★ ★ ★ Baghead ★ ★ The Last

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-46406484538236508562008-01-29T14:55:00.000-07:002008-01-29T15:05:24.501-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ When I saw that Stacy Peralta had another documentary at this year’s Sundance, I put it at the top of my list. Both Riding Giants (surfing) and Dogtown and Z-Boys (skateboarding) were extraordinary peeks into unique and fascinating American cultures. Made in America shifts it's focus to another less romantic section of Southern California, and promised a more

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-87769696928532608412008-01-29T09:30:00.000-07:002008-01-29T09:57:22.826-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ I think Pretty Bird is meant as a symbol of the dotcom era, or at least of dreamy-eyed entrepreneurs with a love for money, an endless supply of chutzpah, and not much else. But if the business plan for their new technology company is filled with holes, it is positively bulletproof when compared to Paul Schneider’s script. This is a film that didn’t just struggle

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-17475482081711705292008-01-29T00:36:00.000-07:002008-01-29T08:47:04.121-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ Ten reasons why I like this movie: 1. IMDB lists 14 movies named “Red” in the past 30 years and this is the only one I’ve seen. 2. Production was bifurcated—shot by two different directors. But you could never tell, a credit more to the final director, Trygve Allister Diesen, than initial director Lucky McKee. 3. The Carmen Sandiego Factor: The movie is set

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-9679591180085412622008-01-28T00:08:00.000-07:002008-01-29T09:58:05.679-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ Terrorism movies the war movies of our generation. But the big difference is that the prospect of terrorism is lurking around all of us, whereas war is something most of us only expect to experience vicariously. So movies about terrorism can be unsettling, because the threat is so very real. That’s the spirit of Incendiary, by director Sharon McGuire (

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-40455981199274739702008-01-27T00:12:00.000-07:002008-01-28T15:49:31.629-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ In 2006, rock ‘n roll icons Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played a “Freedom of Speech” tour to protest the war in Iraq. The band that wrote Ohio, one of the most famous protest songs of the Vietnam era, decided that the country needed a wake-up call, some of the same spirit of protest and activism that once shook national policy and changed our nation forever

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-76542523973112310062008-01-26T17:19:00.000-07:002008-01-28T15:47:12.389-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ In 1972, socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland, former Hollywood model and wife of plastics heir Leo Baekland, was murdered in her London home in a well-publicized and shocking story that captured the public’s ever-morbid interest and fascination. The popular book, Savage Grace, was published in 1986, which was the basis for the screenplay and the movie. It’s the

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-81323312103503007072008-01-26T11:46:00.000-07:002008-01-28T15:44:15.549-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ ★ (out of four) I’m getting a little tired of movies about dysfunctional families, even at this year’s Sundance. But Birds of America manages to break the mold and feel fresh and alive from the outset, delivering a warm, funny, zany, tender and compassionate film that left the audience smiling and content. Morrie (Matthew Perry) is an uptight university

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-22331891467950625172008-01-26T09:48:00.000-07:002008-01-26T09:52:27.801-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ After writing American Beauty and working as a writer, director and producer in TV, Alan Ball makes his big-screen directorial debut with Towelhead, which unfortunately disappoints on almost every count. Based on the novel by Alicia Erian, Towelhead is about a 13-year-old girl (Jasira) coming of age sexually, a disheartening process aided and abetted by neglectful

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-92076817238276924912008-01-26T03:23:00.000-07:002008-01-30T13:31:52.411-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ What a disappointment. The Sundance catalog called The Year of Getting to Know Us a dark comedy. If that’s what writer/director Patrick Sisam was after, he missed the mark badly. This is a drama, and not a very good one at that, with a few random snatches of humor. The casting left me scratching my head. Jimmy Fallon is a very funny guy but was floundering in

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-91240587680960493282008-01-25T08:49:00.000-07:002008-01-26T02:44:13.969-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ Mark and Jay Duplass are Sundance veterans, and I really like their 2005 entry, Puffy Chair. Baghead is more of the same, but instead of a road trip comedy, this one is based on a standard slasher pic situation—a group of fun-loving partiers in a cabin in the woods. Matt and Chad are best buddies who haven’t made it to square one in Hollywood. One night,

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-31355395881901151332008-01-24T03:04:00.001-07:002008-03-03T11:17:58.360-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ ★ (out of four) I absolutely loved The Station Agent in Sundance 2003, so I put Tom McCarthy’s newest movie, The Visitor, at the top of my list. Boy was that a good call. This is a lovely, gentle and touching film that works on many levels. Richard Jenkins gives a perfectly understated performance. A veteran character actor (I counted 75 roles since 1985,

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-28933928816309046812008-01-24T02:10:00.000-07:002008-01-24T03:09:36.560-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ ★ (out of four) A Raisin in the Sun received a sincere, loving and prolonged standing ovation at its Sundance premiere, and it deserved every second of it. Lorraine Hansbury wrote the play in 1959, becoming the first black female to have her play produced on Broadway (she was 27). The original Broadway cast, including legendaries Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee,

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-3363752048383419052008-01-23T09:41:00.000-07:002008-01-23T12:38:18.537-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ The Deal is a wacky and frenetic Hollywood insider movie about a movie, in the spirit of Altman’s The Player or Mamet’s State and Main. Written by and starring William H. Macy and directed by his long-time friend and veteran TV movie director Steven Schachter, The Deal is part vanity piece, part industry insider self-indulgence and wholly funny. Macy plays

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-12717829697197857332008-01-23T09:32:00.000-07:002008-01-23T12:35:01.282-07:00

I wish I could talk intelligently about Death in Love, but I can’t. I only saw the first five minutes, which had some of the sickest stuff I’ve ever seen in a movie. Not knowing how long this would go on, I left. To be fair, I ran into some people coming out and they said they liked it, so either the movie got better or we didn’t share the same tastes. But if you’re sensitive to explicit

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-24604596033627947202008-01-23T09:14:00.001-07:002008-02-18T23:07:40.776-07:00

Sundance 2008 ★ ★ After the premiere of Sleepwalking, Charlize Theron, who produced and starred, talked about how inspiring she thought the script was. Others commented that Sleepwalking was all about hope and redemption. And I sat wondering what movie they watched, because the version I saw had precious little of that. In fact, I thought Sleepwalking was pretty standard Sundance fare. A

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-79665466216681560462008-01-21T23:47:00.000-07:002008-01-22T00:14:54.079-07:00

Sundance 2008 ★ ★ ★ ★ (out of four) OK, maybe four stars are too much. Maybe Diminished Capacity isn’t “all that and a bag of chips,” as a friend of mine is fond of saying. But I’ll tell you what, it’s pretty funny. I think I heard more laughing than anything I’ve seen at Sundance since Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine. That bodes well for the box office prospects of this film.

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-23940458498932764302008-01-21T22:54:00.000-07:002008-01-24T09:36:19.269-07:00

Sundance 2008 ★ ★ ★ Proposition 1: This is a classic Sundance movie. Starring Luke Wilson (now tell me that doesn’t just ooze Sundanceness! Dialogue driven. No special effects. Low budget. Proposition 2: This is a real departure for Sundance. Gee, it seems to be religious, albeit in a weird sort of way. There are all these undertones of faith and hope and the priest doesn’t come

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-33289180537065961152008-01-21T18:27:00.000-07:002008-01-22T22:28:55.441-07:00

Accommodations in Park City are hard to find during Sundance. However, because of a last minute cancellation, we have a spectacular Park City condo available at the Grand Summit. The Grand Summit is located at The Canyons Ski Resort and is a full ski-in ski-out resort with heated outdoor swimming pool, hottubs, concierge, bellman, 2 restaurants, and full health spa. Grand Summit 503 is a

DPnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-11284501953191023252008-01-20T01:57:00.001-07:002008-01-21T13:18:33.569-07:00

Sundance 2008 ★ ★ ★ Went to the U2 3D premiere. Bono was there and everyone went nuts over that. Al Gore was there too, and no one went nuts over him, but he did shake hands like the seasoned politician that he is. Actually, the whole U2 band showed up, and Robert Redford and other celebrities. Watched the movie with my funky 3D glasses. It will be an instant classic rock ‘n roll movie.

Billnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-54356997589784501842008-01-20T01:31:00.000-07:002008-01-21T13:19:40.046-07:00

Sundance 2008 ★ ★ I read the synopsis of The Last Word in the Sundance catalog, which said it was a hilarious dark comedy about a guy who makes a living writing suicide notes. The idea sounded so fresh and unusual that I was braced for something very funny. But it never happened. In fact, I wouldn’t say this is a comedy at all, but rather a sometimes intense drama with an absurd premise and

Billnoreply@blogger.com