D+ Character-driven comedy Written by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan Directed by Lawrence Kasdan I hate watching good actors, some of whom I’ve admired for decades, struggle through a bad script. That made Darling Companion a very difficult movie to sit through. Here we have a character-driven comedy almost entirely lacking in either fully developed characters [...]
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Last night I attended the San Francisco International Film Festival‘s Centerpiece presentation, consisting of a movie, a Q&A, and a party. A- Your Sister’s Sister This film kept surprising me. The opening scene, involving a group of young adults memorializing a recently-deceased friend, felt like The Big Chill. But the movie was about only two [...]
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Last night I attended the San Francisco International Film Festival silent movie event at the Castro–four Buster Keaton shorts (two of them actually Fatty Arbuckle shorts with Keaton in supporting roles), accompanied by Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs along with guitarist Ava Mendoza. This is something of a tradition at the Festival–screening silent films with accompaniment [...]
Filed under: Comedy, Festivals, First-person Report, SFIFF, Silent Films | Tagged: Buster Keaton, silent films | 1 Comment »
I hit the jackpot for my second and last movie on Friday. First, they were giving out free popcorn and free beer. But the beer was only allowed in the balcony (this was in the Kabuki’s big Theater 1). I don’t like watching movies from the balcony, so I skipped the beer. I also hit [...]
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Got off to a bad start with my first movie of the festival: Robot and Frank. They didn’t let people into the theater until 5 minutes before the movie was supposed to start. Then they rushed us in and started the film quickly. As far as the movie was concerned C+ Robot & Frank, This [...]
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Woody Allen followed the triumph of Annie Hall with a dead-serious drama that few people saw and even fewer liked: Interiors (Confession: I haven’t seen it). Luckily for his career, Allen followed Interiors with Manhattan. Like Annie Hall, Manhattan is a realistic, character-driven comedy about love, romance, and how the sexual urge messes up our [...]
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How do you top Some Like It Hot? Billy Wilder found the answer in The Apartment, a far more serious comedy about the battle of sexes. Or more precisely, about how powerful men exploit both women and less-powerful men. When The Apartment came out in 1960, critics complained that Wilder didn’t seem to know if [...]
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There are romantic comedies, and then there’s Annie Hall. It’s about a romance, and it’s definitely a comedy, but Woody Allen’s masterpiece works so far outside the genre that it feels like something entirely different. Annie Hall tracks a very realistic relationship–mostly in chronological order. We watch as up-and-coming standup comic Alvy Singer (Allen) and [...]
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Three MST3K veterans add comic commentary to Plan Nine from Outer Space, allegedly the worst film of all time. I laughed so hard I was gasping for breath. When I started reviewing Blu-ray discs on this blog, my policy would be to stick with classics. I’m not sure if this review is a derivation from [...]
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Since I first discovered Buster Keaton almost 40 years ago, I’ve considered Seven Chances one of his best features. That was an unusual opinion in the 1970s, when even Keaton fans barely knew this picture existed. But its status has been rising in recent years, and I’m hoping that Kino’s new Blu-ray release will help [...]
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