Action Comedy Written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember Directed by Peter Segal I approach films based on old TV shows with suspicion, but the comic potential of Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart lowered my guard. But while Get Smart has its charms, it doesn’t fulfill that potential by a long shot. Carell wisely [...]
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The July/August Pacific Film Archive schedule arrived in yesterday’s mail. It makes me want to move permanently into that theater. They’re running five series this summer, honoring a director, a cinematographer, a novelist, a studio, and an aspect ratio. The studio is United Artists, receiving its yet another 90th anniversary retrospective. But unlike the UA [...]
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Two of my biggest passions–Judaism and cinema–come together this summer like they do every summer for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. (Come to think of it, some of my other big passions–music, history, and sex–turn up here, as well.) The organizers are calling the 28th SFIFF the largest one ever, with “70 films from [...]
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Just before I left on vacation I received a press release for two upcoming series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I’m finally now getting to it. As the name implies, Jean Cocteau: The Orphic Trilogy screens only three films, Le Sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet), Orphée (Orpheus), and Le Testament [...]
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I have a lot of apologizing to do. As a PC World columnist, I often admonish readers for not backing up and keeping their security software up-to-date. And while I do everything possible to keep my PC and data safe, I haven’t been so diligent about my blog. And thus, when I got back from [...]
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I came back from vacation to discover the bayflicks.net web site hijacked I believe the hijacking happened on Saturday, June 14. I removed it today. If you’ve visited the site in the last week, and have a Windows-based PC, it’s possible that your computer is infected with Trojan-Downloader.JS.Agent downloader. You can read up on it [...]
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Samurai drama Written by Yoji Yamada, Emiko Hiramatsu, and Ichiro Yamamoto Directed by Yoji Yamada Yoji Yamada makes Samurai films like nobody else’s. Past works like Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade looked at the legendary warriors as lower-middleclass drones, worrying about money as they perform their dull peacetime jobs for an indifferent lord for [...]
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