reviews

In a male-dominated industry — filmmaking — there’s probably not a specialty more fueled by testosterone than stuntwork, and the women who choose this bruise- and discrimination-ridden path are exactly as tough as you’d expect. Two of them are profiled in Amanda Micheli’s festival-favorite documentary, which never lets its enormous love and respect for its … more…

Okay, baron, actually. Orlando Bloom plays a baron, a medieval French baron. But still. Yum. I’m sorry — I can’t help it. He’s *beautiful.* So, I’m shallow. I admit it. He’s *gorgeous,* and any hotblooded heterosexual woman who denies she’s going to see *Kingdom of Heaven* just because Orlando Bloom is in it is lying, I tell ya: lying. Or else she’s a medieval scholar and wants to see how Hollywood gets it all wrong. But even that woman is going to Not Care how wrong it might be when he strides across the screen all long and lanky and swings a sword and gets all angst-ridden for more reasons than a man should have to be angst-ridden and blinks those limpid eyes in masculine pain and talks with that mouth you just want to smush and make all the hurt go away…

There’s a sexy figure on display throughout *House of Wax,* and we probably won’t see its like ever again. It’s the sign at a rural Florida gas station announcing that the price of gas is — *drool* — $1.19 a gallon. Oh, baby.

Trippy! There’s a lot of cult love for this 1974 Japanese animated production of the classic fairy tale, and no wonder. It starts off pretty straightforward, sticking to the story we all know about the boy who sells his cow for a couple of magic beans and telling it through rather bland, simplistic animation. But … more…

It’s hard to believe that this could be a kinder, gentler Bill Maher than we’ve seen of late, but this HBO comedy special was taped in 2000, before Maher ran afoul of the new post-9/11 miasma created by the new political correctness bumping up against a contraction of personal freedom, before he got real crotchety. … more…

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.