Pimp My Action Movie So I overhear this gang of guys and girls chattering away excitedly after the semi-public screening of XXX: State of the Union, and they can’t shut up about what a great movie this is, how it’s “the best action movie since Die Hard,” one of them says. Why? “There’s not a … more…

Kim Ki-duk’s follow-up to his beautifully, expressively quiet Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring is another film that is beautifully, expressively quiet in a completely different way. Tae-suk (Jae Hee) walks on the outermost edges of city society, a modern Goldilocks who breaks into houses and apartments while the inhabitants are away, sleeping in their … more…

The bracing, windswept landscapes of England’s Cornish coast are mirrored in the poignancy of this tale of loneliness reprieved through a sudden awakening of feelings long suppressed. Two sisters living alone in a seaside cottage find their dull routine upended, in the most delightful way, by the arrival of an unexpected houseguest: a young man … more…

This is my copy of *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.* It’s the first and only copy of the book I’ve ever owned, and I acquired it in, what? eighth grade, maybe. It’s sorta hard to see in the photo, but the front cover has had to be scotch-taped back onto the spine, which is itself in such poor shape that most of the original text has long since worn away. The entire book is so beat up that if I weren’t suffering from such a massive case of geeky disappointment (more on which to come in a moment), I’d probably go into Douglas Adams mode and say something like how the book could only be considered dog-eared if the dog were in fact the Demented Galactawolverine of some silly planet with lots of Gs and Zs in its name, which as everyone knows has 125 ears and as such is the only canine in the universe for which dog whistles blah blah blah.

It is revealed in *Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams,* the 2002 direct-to-video biography of/tribute to the writer, that the horror of getting a film made of his signature novel, *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,* was ‘the single most substantial frustration of [his] professional life.’ We can now, of course, only guess at how he would have taken to Hollywood’s adaptation of the book — Adams died suddenly and unexpectedly in May 2001 — but for those to whom the movie will be their first exposure to the man’s outrageous satire and piercing wit, *Life* is a loving and funny introduction to the man himself.

It has the veneer of significance, and that’s really all a Hollywood movie needs these days to be considered ‘serious,’ right? Everyone involved is pedigreed — director Sydney Pollack and stars Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn have all won Oscars — and they’re dishing out a high-toned film set in the hushed and somber world of international diplomacy, one that raises the spectre of Middle Eastern-style suicide bombings on streets of New York, though not in any gratuitous or *Die Hard*-y way, oh no, more in the way of a smothered nightmare that hovers on the edge of your awareness that all New Yorkers post-9/11 will recognize.

If you’re looking for some real verve at the movies right now, you’ve gotta head east… waaay east, to a place where if the filmmakers are working within their own traditional framework and structures and dealing with their own hoary clichés and tropes, those building blocks are all at least fresher to those of us weaned on Hollywood flicks and getting tired of seeing the same old thing.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so crushingly disappointed in something I was certain was a sure bet. How could this happen? How could Eric Idle have morphed, seemingly overnight, from a satiric force of legendary and historic proportions (or, at least, from part of a satiric force of legendary and historic proportions, ie, Monty … more…

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic short story plays like an 18th-century episode of The Twilight Zone, exuding an enigmatic romanticism, in this 1980 production from PBS’s erstwhile American Short Story Collection. The sound and video are quite atrocious — near Zapruder quality, actually — but the power of the tale of forbidden love and twisted devotion shines … more…