Los Angeles

Million Dollar Baby (review)

no comments yet

Oh, but this is a sucker punch of a movie, harsh and sere and so thoroughly unsentimental that it seems to have active contempt for lesser movies that pander to the audience’s desire to walk out of the theater feeling good and happy and that all is right in the world. This is like winning the lottery and getting hit by a train on your way to cash in your ticket. This is not for anyone who feels the need to escape real life at the multiplex. This *is* real life, as real as film gets. You are warned.

Near Dark, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Bitten, Blacula, Love at First Bite, and Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter (review)

no comments yet

Of course, most respected anthropologists and biologists recognize that the New World Vampire, or *vampirus americanus*, differs greatly from the European species, or *vampirus continentalus*, but few films have recognized that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. produce a vastly altered creature than Europe’s dense urban spaces or intimate, if remote, medieval villages. But years before John Carpenter and the team of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez documented the vampires that dwell in the lonely stretches of the Americas, the criminally underappreciated ethnographer Kathryn Bigelow did it — spookily, grimly, hilariously, gloriously — with 1987’s *Near Dark,* in which a coven of nasty bloodsuckers roam the deserted American Southwest.

Cellular (review)

no comments yet

That’s the kind of flick *Cellular* is: goofily obvious when it isn’t unexpectedly exciting. It’s one of those movies that succeeds partly by not being anywhere near as bad as you were expecting it to be — by being, really, not so bad at all, much to one’s shocked surprise. Seriously, I was anticipating two hours of that annoyingly pseudo-hip Elvis Costello-ish guy from the TV commercials who wanders around saying ‘Can you hear me now?’ into his cell phone — and why o why won’t someone kidnap *him*? — and instead the goofily obvious stuff is more than made up for by the suspense and the humor.

The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious (review)

no comments yet

I approached my parked car after the screening, I found myself wishing it was something a little zippier than a poky little Saturn, and boy I bet a Saturn would be pretty cool tricked out for street racing. And as I drove home, I found myself wondering if those buttons on either side of the steering wheel would ignite the tanks of nitrous oxide under the backseat. (No — they were still for the horn.)

Training Day (review)

no comments yet

It takes a wolf to catch a wolf, says Los Angeles narcotics detective Alonzo Harris. All us little sheep need a wolf on our side to protect us from the other wolves. But shouldn’t we be afraid that “our” wolf might turn on us one day, and even if he doesn’t and keeps the dangerous wolves at bay, isn’t it only wolves who win in the end?

Double Indemnity (review)

1 comment

In the wee hours of July 16, 1938, an insurance salesman Walter Neff sits down at a dictation machine in the offices of Pacific All-Risk in Los Angeles to record a confession. That guy Dietrichson, who died mysteriously? Neff killed him.

Go (review)

no comments yet

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.