Timothy Treadwell and Werner Herzog were made for each other. Unfortunately their meeting meant the death of Treadwell, as Herzog’s Grizzly Man documents Treadwell’s life and death at the paws of the grizzly bears Treadwell felt were his surrogate family. Knowing how things end makes Grizzly Man an uncomfortable watch, not because we get to …
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Way late review: The Adventures of Tintin
2011’s scariest movie of the year, The Adventures of Tintin? Maybe not, but the animation style first made popular by the just as terrifying Polar Express is not comforting. Even more disconcerting is Tintin’s orange on a toothpick head. His boyish looks mashed up with his Bourne like skills don’t make sense. Every other character …
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I’m sorry Apple, this is stupid
The iPod Touch (4th generation) is a nice device. What isn’t so nice is trying to load music onto it from anything other than iTunes. I work for Canonical and run Ubuntu on all our computers here at home. Even before joining Canonical I had switched over to Ubuntu. With that bias out of the …
Way late review: Hugo
Martin Scorsese’s love letter to cinema, Hugo, is like most love letters – full of passion, often beautiful, yet lacking in anything resembling a cohesive narrative. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan who keeps the clocks ticking behind a train station in Paris. Why he and almost everyone around him have British accents is …
Way late review: Being Elmo
It’s Elmo’s world, we only get to watch it. That’s until Being Elmo exposes the red furry one’s diabolic plans to rule the world! OK, so maybe the documentary Being Elmo isn’t anything like that. Part of me wishes it was or at least dared to take a bizarre twist in the third act in …
Way late review: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
When I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind a number of years ago for the first time I remember being disappointed. I wanted E.T. and instead I got a bizarre story of a man who sees a UFO and proceeds to lose his mind. Years later I appreciated Spielberg’s first alien movie much more …
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Way late review: Project Nim
If the story of a chimp raised by humans told in Project Nim sounds vaguely familiar to the blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes, there’s a good reason for that. The screenwriters for Rise were well aware of Nim, the chimp whom scientists wanted to see if they could teach sign language as …
Way late review: The Ides of March
George Clooney’s The Ides of March is a political thriller that attempts to thrill with the revelation that human beings are not inherently good. Not much of a revelation and not much of a thriller. Ides of March attempts to make grandiose gestures set to menacing music and shadowy backdrops but ultimately ends up being …
True/False Film Fest 2012: Sunday
All good things come to an end and I ended my three days at True/False 2012 in Columbia, MO intentionally early. The docs I was most interested in seeing were later in the afternoon and most of them I believe I’ll be able to catch later this year as they either have distribution or soon …
True/False Film Fest 2012: Saturday
Day two of the festival for me. A very ambitious day, as I picked five movies to watch. That’s the most I could fit in for today. I wanted to stay for maybe only one or two movies on Sunday so I could get back home at a reasonable time which meant Saturday was going …