Standard Operating Procedure
Smoking hot money-shot reviewing, April '08:
We Are Wizards (2007) Doc made by high schoolers about extreme Harry Potter fandom. Terrifying.
My Brother Is an Only Child (Mio Fratello Figlio Unico) (2007) Reviewed here.
Beowulf (2007) Although deftly, Oedipally rewritten to fit the Hollywood standard of what-goes-around-comes-around storysmithing, a waste of hard-drive space. Digitals can’t act. And why are the women always cross-eyed?
The Ruins (2008) Boy, A Simple Plan was smart and gripping.
What Remains (2006) Sally Mann is a savvy narcissist, and her documentarian just wants to fuck her.
Party 7 (2000) The warmup swing before A Taste of Tea and Funky Forest: The First Contact, and not at all amusing.
Leatherheads (2008) Such a shame. Could set the the cause of historical sports movies back a decade.
Hypocrites (1915) Lois Weber’s magical moral diatribe, outshining Griffith in his prime. More here.
The Ocean Waif (1916) Alice Guy-Blache goes commercial. Doris Kenyon may’ve been the loveliest WWI-era actress in America.
The Pied Piper of Hutzovina (2006) Eugene Hutz goes to Eastern Europe and Russia, a British documentarian in love with the lug goes, and nothing is consummated except Hutz’s sweaty intercourse with his concert audience.
Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) Mumble this. Actually, Greta Gerwig is terrific as the in-between girl everybody wants.
Standard Operating Procedure (2008) Errol Morris, stop blowing Karl Rove. Where’s the investigation up the ladder? And what is it with all that Elfman-scored F/X bullshit? What’s here that CNN didn’t tell me? My knives are out in In These Times.
I Am Legend (2007) A lazy rent. The Matheson book still awaits the right adaptation. For one thing, without the book’s ending the title makes no sense.
Bosque de Sombras (The Backwoods) (2006) Gary Oldman and Virginie Ledoyen and some little girl with Muppet gloves Straw Dogs-ing in Basque country, kinda, and for what reason I couldn’t say.
‘49-‘17 (1917) The first full-on Western parody? Short-lived phenom Ruth Ann Baldwin (who made 12 films in 1917 before being demoted to the script department at Universal) rips the cliches open, but gently.
The Guatemalan Handshake (2006) A wondrous, eccentric indie from Forgottentown, PA. I wax at IFC Blog.
Inside (l'Intérieur) (2007) Nothing is more vulnerable than a pregnant belly, but this blood bucket blows every opportunity, and goes too far too soon too crassly.
Smart People (2008) The firsttimer directing did whatever he could to fuck it up, but the literate personality in the house keeps things afloat. Thomas Haden Church deserves a Nobel.
Bamako (2006) Abderrahmane Sissako’s best film, and the oddest political polemic to come out of a developing nation since, well, maybe ever.
Beowulf comment about crossed-eyed women: see Kristin Bell in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
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