April 2010
6 posts
3 tags
El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes,...
El secreto de sus ojos won the 2010 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, triumphing over such works as Michael Haneke’s Das weisse band and Un prophète. This Argentine film is actually rather good—a meditation on memories, the past, love, and so forth—but I would have expected something rather more… transcendental to be the Oscar winner.
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5 tags
Kick-Ass (2010) review
It’s not exactly what I expected, but Kick-Ass is a satisfactory comic-book action film, no instant cult classic nor a colossal fraud, but somewhere in-between the two extremes.
I’d read very little detailed information prior to viewing this, so perhaps it’s my fault I was expecting lighter fare, more of a comedy than an ultra-violent melange of post-modern homages and...
2 tags
Kynodontas (Dogtooth) 2010 review
Dysfunctional families make for good cinema. Ask Michael Haneke. Ask Wes Anderson. Ask Giorgios Lanthimos. Who? Lanthimos, the director of the Greek film Kynodontas (aka Dogtooth), a fascinating and entertaining absurdist film about a really dysfunctional family. Or is it dysfunctional? Things seem to be going well enough, everyone’s happy, until a “serpent” enters...
2 tags
Date Night (2010) review
Date Night is the cinematic equivalent of a turkey sandwich with mayo on white bread: inoffensive, bland, staves off hunger pangs, but isn’t fully satisfying. I smiled three or four times, Steve Carell and Tina Fey are likeable performers, I wasn’t frustrated or offended, but…people paid theatre ticket prices to see this? Someone really thought (rightly—in terms of...
Bark Cat Bark—“Iceland,” a lovely, evocative...
3 tags
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) review
The latest “high concept” film to hit theatres, Hot Tub Time Machine turns out to be surprisingly sincere and “nice,” rather than the wacky gross-out comedy I halfway expected (halfway, because other reviewers tipped me off this wasn’t bad at all). Some audiences may actually feel cheated because the picture isn’t as crude and slap-sticky as they would have...
