handcrafted by maryann johanson (human) | 100% free of AIs and algorithms
Do screenwriters bother with characterization or motive for Old Scratch? Rarely — the Prince of Darkness is supposed to just coast on his rep as the Ultimate Bad Dude, and yet those selfsame screenwriters must, by storytelling necessity, declaw him, prevent him from taking full advantage of the hellish forces at his command.
One of my very favorite movies, a superb example of the genus Popcorn Flick, unforgettable as it puts onscreen imagery we’ve never seen before. This is as close as I get to turning my brain off at the movies.
A witty Aardman-brand treat: Chicken Run is a sneaky, cheeky parody of prison and escape movies that nevertheless finds decidedly unsentimental pathos in the predicament of farmyard chickens.
Writer/director Tom Tykwer captures all of GenX’s best qualities — energy, resourcefulness, independence — and he does so in the shared visual vernacular of Xers: music videos, video games, and television.
So, Go’s three interconnected tales follow a diverse group of Los Angeles twentysomethings as their lives bang up against one another in a scenario that’s the 90s in a nutshell, from the Xer point of view: sex and danger that’s both exciting and terrifying (the clever script uses the word ‘go’ both in the imperative, let’s-get-out-of-here sense and also in the imperative, orgasmic sense, as a synonym for ‘come’). And is if to demonstrate typical Xer cynicism, it all happens while holly jolly Christmas passes by practically unnoticed in the background.
Miracle on 34th Street is, as all of us who love this classic film know, the story of how Macy’s department store in New York City not only found the real Santa Claus but hired him to, well, play Santa Claus.
I’d never even heard of this film before I started putting together A Very Flick Filosopher Christmas, and I can’t imagine why that should be. Light and funny, this should be a holiday staple.
Beautifully written by W.D. Richter and directed with a sure hand by Jodie Foster, Home for the Holidays wraps all those contradictory feelings up and serves them for Thanksgiving dinner. Perhaps the most realistic holiday movie I’ve ever seen, this oddly charming, poignant, and blackly funny film is a treasure not to be missed.
But if you knew when we as a species were going to buy the farm, how would you spend your final hours? That’s the question Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar asks in Last Night, which he wrote, directed, and stars in. Sort of the flip side of movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact, Last Night focuses not on the heroes trying to save the planet from certain doom but instead peeks in at how ordinary people are facing the end of the world.
How would my life be different if only I’d taken the road not taken? This fun little movie favors an inevitability, a brand of destiny about who we meet and what we do…
sample sponsored post (sponsored) - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce quis risus odio.
