BilmBlog500

I saw around 100 movies that opened in 2014, which is a pretty typical year for me.  Rarely less than 90, hard to see more than 120. Of those 100 movies. Boyhood is the best. Here are the next dozen or so movies that I consider to be my 90th percentile for the year: 2.  Whiplash This is the one other film from 2014 that I've seen twice, though it's possible there are one or two others I'd try to see again. JK Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the film also won Oscars for editing and for sound mixing. Simmons is the leader of the top ensemble at a Juilliard-like performing arts school, and Miles Teller is a student who yearns to be playing drums in this ensemble.  And the two are both crazy.  Simmons might be an actual psychopath, or he might just take a little bit too seriously the idea that you've got to tear down in order to build up.  Which, just to say, is the entire premise behind boot camp for the US armed forces.  But what would dri...

This fall season marks both my 50th birthday and the 20th anniversary of establishing JABberwocky Literary Agency.  To celebrate, I screened a film at the Museum of the Moving Image for a select group from virtually all phases of my life.  I didn't name the film in the invitation, though the invitations included references to enough of the catch phrases immortalized by the film that it wasn't exactly a state secret. Here, slightly edited, are the program notes I prepared: ---------------------------------------- When Jerry Maguire opened on Dec. 13, 1996, I sat down to see it projected (in 35mm, on part of the screen) on the Imax at the Loews Lincoln Square. I was expecting to like it. I didn’t realize that I was about as close to my autobiography as Hollywood is likely to get. The “expecting to like” is easy; it was Tom Cruise in a Cameron Crowe movie, with a decent coming attraction. Tom Cruise and I have very special relationship.  Top Gun is extra special to me. ...

So I saw five movies the weekend before Christmas, and am happy to say I didn't entirely like any of them. First up was Barbara, a German movie which has been getting excellent reviews.  It isn't so excellent.  The eponymous lead character is a doctor in East Germany in the early 1980s who has been assigned to work at a new hospital.  We see her working at the hospital, getting attached to another doctor in a romantic way, and to a patient or two in an empathic way.  The German secret police come by every so often to her apartment and search it up and down, then have a female agent come in to search her up and down.  We see her biking all over town, sometimes to have a romantic tryst with a government official.  Well made, yes.  But sometimes I think critics are hampered in their judgment because they go to a movie with the press kit, or they go to a play and are given a copy of the play.  And this is one of those times.  Barbara is so suffus...

What do you say about Tony Scott? Well, I don't think you'll be hearing this too many times in the obituaries and reminiscences that are going to be out and about in the wake of his tragic suicide, but I think I'd compare him most to Martin Scorcese. Yes, Martin Scorcese. Because I think the experience of going to the movies isn't just about if a movie is good or bad but about the memories it creates. There are directors who don't create memories at all, I can't rouse myself to like or dislike a Betty Thomas film, let's say, Beverly Hillbillies wasn't good but I don't dwell on it. But at both his best and at his worst, Tony Scott created great memories. There's Top Gun, which I'm now watching on Blu Ray. It was made 20 years before Blu Ray and yet if you're wondering if it's worth upgrading from a regular DVD, Top Gun could be the test reel. It wasn't the first movie I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza , but it was the first I sa...

On the evening of Sunday July 10 I made my way to the AMC Empire and saw Knight and Day (aud #25) and The Girl Who Played With Fire (aud #18). And enjoyed both. Knight and Day took a critical reaming, but it seems to be getting some decent word of mouth and holding pretty decently at the box office, and deservedly so. No, it's not great art, but it's a lot of fun and a perfectly pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. There's totally nothing wrong with that. I've generally been happy as a clam the past 25 years to spend a little bit of time with Tom Cruise, and here he's on Cruise Control. Nothing serious about this, no Magnolia thing or Born on the 4th of July thing, totally Cocktail Tom here. He has me at "hello." And there's good chemistry between him and Cameron Diaz. A lot of the critics have made out as if this was some cheapo thing like The Bucket List where you could tell in every shot that Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson weren't...

Wherein I will do a wrap on movies I've seen in recent months without blogging about. Pinky:  Pride & Glory,  seen Saturday afternoon Nov. 8, 2008 at the AMC Courthouse 8, Aud. #7.  1.5 slithy toads.  This is the kind of movie I've been going to less as I cut back some from 5 or 10 years ago on the number of movies I make time to see.  It had gotten mediocre reviews, and it has been awaiting release for a year, but I decided I should nonetheless see it because (a) it stars Edward Norton, whose generally impressed from Primal Fear on thru and usually makes good choices in the movies he makes and if not good ones then interesting and (b) co-stars Colin Farrell, another actor who is often interesting in his choices if not always good.  Alas, this was not an interesting choice for either of them.  Raise your hands if you've seen as movie about corrupt cop, loving wife, conflicted family, father figure on force, etc. etc. etc.  This is that movie.  I'm not sure why these...

Tropic Thunder. Seen Saturday Night August 23, 2008 at Clearview's Ziegfeld. 4 Slithy Toads. Transsiberan. Seen Saturday Night August 23, 2008 at the Paris Theatre. 1.5 Slithy Toads. These 2 films offer an important message about the international trafficking in heroin, and it is particularly apt that I saw them both on the same night. Tropic Thunder, the first of these films, is hilarious. I was laughing loud and hard for good chunks of the movie, I can't honestly remember when I've laughed as loud or as long or as heartily in a movie, and I am giving it my highest rating. You're probably read a lot about this movie in lots of other places, so I don't need to say too much about it synopsis wise, I don't think. Starts out with 3 wonderful fake film trailers. If you're interested in Satan's Alley, then you might want to read some real novels, the Vampire Victor books VAMPIRE VOW, VAMPIRE THRALL and VAMPIRE TRANSGRESSION by Michael Schiefelbein. B...

In my day job, I usually find that the winning authors produce the goods consistently, book in and book out, year after year, and then sometimes come up with a novel that's truly and remarkably special, and every once in a while disappoint a tad, but by and large work with remarkable consistency. Like many great film directors, Sydney Pollack represents a very different path that I have a hard time adjusting to. The one masterpiece. The many good films. The highly and wildly overpraised turd. And then so much that you have a hard time believing came from the same director who did everything else. If my clients were as up and down as a Sydney Pollack and a Martin Scorcese I'd be grayer and balder if I weren't already so much of both. In Pollack's case, I consider Out of Africa to be Oscar bait, critics bait, the kind of turgid lugubrious epic that comes along every so often and which just isn't really very good. I don't think this one has stood the test of...

Seen at Clearview's Chelsea Cinema, Auditorium #4, Saturday afternoon March 29, 2008. 3.5 Slithy Toads. This is the best movie of the year so far. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to read a review, good or bad, that reviews the movie on its own terms, divorced from its place in history following a string of (generally inferior) movies dealing with the Iraq war that have been box office disappointments. And also unfortunately, it seems to arrive at the moment when many critics have decided to drop grading these Iraq movies on a curve, giving plentiful extra points for worthy intentions, or even just for the bare bones of the subject matter, to things like In The Valley of Elah, which certainly had its share of negative reviews but also quite inexplicably managed to appear on many Top 10 lists. It's a double whammy, in which this really good movie is being victimized on multiple levels by the Critical Consensus, getting worse reviews than it deserves to compensate for films...