BilmBlog500

Seen Saturday evening June 28 at the Regal Kaufman Astoria 14, auditorium #13. 2 slithy toads? Or 0? Or 4? So getting back to what I said about French films in my last post, here we have a movie from a genuine American auteur that's been totally dumped on and disrespected. Is it a good film? Not sure that it is, or why anyone should see it. Is it a bad film? In an ocean of movies without craft or ambition this has plenty of both. Like A.I., it's a failed movie which no true student of American cinema should miss. It makes it very hard to know how many toads to give it. So let's try and give this some of the serious (& spoiler-filled) analysis that too few of the reviews have had. A. This is a clear departure for the auteur, M. Knight Shyamalan, whose Lady in the Water I have missed but whose work I've otherwise seen from Sixth Sense forward. There are no secrets at the end, no sudden reveals. The plants are doing it. It's a thing of nature. It can...

Roman De Gare (2.5 Slithy Toads) and The Grocer's Son (Le Fils de l'epicier) (1.5 Slithy Toads). Both seen Sunday afternoon June 22, 2008 at Cinema Village , aud. #3 and #1. I have this thing with French (ooops, Freedom ) films. I tend to find many of them are overrated because they're in French, that things critics wouldn't put up with in an American film suddenly become acceptable when in a foreign tongue, the French tongue especially. Amorphous plotlessness, cloying sentimentality, other things. This isn't limited only to French films, though I think it infects the critical response to them more than to others. This may be a legacy of the fact that the French critical establishment and directors in its spell were especially crucial to the development of the "New Wave" 40 years ago. Or maybe it's all Benjamin Franklin's fault. There's also a certain bias critics have toward certain directors in the US that might not withstand an empero...

So I'm buying Yodels at Pathmark tonight because they're on sale for $1.99 for the "family pack." And I notice it has this extra logo on it, that the package now says "Drakes ... by Hostess," with a note on the back to tell me "Since 1998, Drakes and Hostess have had more in common than bakery-fresh taste. They've both made by the same company. You can taste this dedication to quality in everything we make, from our famous Twinkie and Devil Dog snack cakes..." For the many of you who do not know, a Drake is (in this context) not a duck but a regional brand of snack cakes (though one with a duck as its mascot), mostly in the Northeast, and as explained at length in the Wikipedia article on the subject without much long-term success when trying to branch out. Interestingly, Drake's was once owned by Borden, which also owned the NE-localized Wise chips brand. A Yodel is their version of a swiss roll, chocolate cake and cream rolled up ...

Seen at the Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, Sunday afternoon June 15, 2008. 4 Slithy Toads. Following on its rather dismal main stage productions of Parlour Song and Port Authority , the Atlantic Theater redeems its season with this thoroughly delightful production on its second stage. This may not be the best play I've ever seen, but it might be one of the first that's left me wanting to see a sequel. If anyone was going to try and write a revival of the TV show Soap (one of my all-time favorite shows, along with Party of Five, The Simpsons and Friday Night Lights) I'd say it could be this young playwright Annie Baker, who shows in these 90 minutes a real gift for taking the odd parts of real life and making them very very real, very very funny and very very poignant, which was what Susan Harris managed to do in the very best episodes of Soap (Carol leaving Jody at the alter, a classic example). The odd parts of real life. The four characters in this play are: Jare...

At least based on the comment counts, my blog readers don't really care so much if the newspaper industry withers away to a Sunday coupon delivery vehicle and a few articles on the Dillon Panthers during the football season. But I'll keep hacking away at the topic because it's one I care about. A brief recap : newspaper advertising is under attack, as the internet gobbles up more and more of it. Newspaper circulation is under attack since more people go online for their news, and younger people especially see newspapers as less important. Even online migration to newspaper web sites helps only so much since the ads there generate less revenue than the print ads. The economy doesn't help. Recessions are bad for ads. You need fuel to drive trucks to deliver newspapers. I don't have any good solutions to this, but the newspaper industry has most often tried to cut its way to success. Fewer reporters, fewer bureaus, fewer pages of smaller size, etc. Now, the o...

So I'm just back from Toronto, where I was a guest agent at Bloody Words . Toronto is my kind of place. Urban. Walkable. Good mass transit. TImbits on every corner, chocolate glazed and cherry and original and apple fritter and duchie timbits and more timbits when you've finished those. Timbits, timbits, timbits! But I digress, for this post is supposed to talk about two of the best Toronto treats, known respectively as The World's Biggest Bookstore and Bakka Phoenix Books . The World's Biggest Bookstore is not actually the world's biggest by square footage, though it is very big, and when it first opened almost 30 years ago may even have been. Regardless, the name is I believe trademarked by the current owners, the Canadian bookstore chain Indigo . But the important thing to me is that for many many years it has clearly been the case that the World's Biggest Bookstore does indeed have the biggest selection of new books of any bookstore I've been i...

Mongol. Seen Tuesday evening June 3, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Aud. #9 (the Majestic). 1 Slithy Toad. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Seen Tuesday evening June 3, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Aud., #2 (The Kings). 2.5 Slithy Toads. So to do the obscure movie first... Mongol is a Russian movie depicting the Adventures of Genghis Khan as a Young (and Not so Young) Boy, ending after he has united the Mongol empire but before he has conquered the world. It blames everything on the fact that Genghis lost his sled Rosebud (excuse me, his father) when he was a young boy. I hate not to like it because I got to see a preview screening via the Museum of the Moving Image , and the direct Sergei Bodrov was there and did a Q&A afterward, but I don't think it's very good. That being said, give the movie an extra toad if you liked Lawrence of Arabia. This movie is a real wonder to look at, filmed on exotic locations all over the world and...