Silver Screen in a Red Envelope: A Diary of Time Wasted

Okay, clearly I'm the kind of person who likes a little quirk with her Christmas. There's a few facts about me you should know before you take any of my recommendations: 1) I hate Santa. Seriously. I'm convinced that the tradition, however kindly and warm-hearted it began, has become a tool for undermining the true faith and confidence of child-type persons everywhere. Santa=Satan. Just call me the grinch and get over it. I'm absolutely what the Grinch would be, if he had been raised Calvinist. The Grinch is also not on this list. 2) I have a severe distaste for Frank Capra.  It's a Wonderful Life is NOT on this list. 3) I have never seen  National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation , and I didn't see  A Christmas Story until I was well too old to think it was funny, or develop any warm memories. That's at least five Christmas Classics that aren't making this list. You're bound to think one of them is the shizzle. Are you still with me? Let's get...

I'll be honest: I watched this film because I adore Brad Dourif, and I'm happy to say this film shows him doing his best thing - shouting "No!" and curling into an agonized ball. Well done. I am satisfied. As a horror film, this movie is creepy enough, I suppose. People act violently, unkindly, and unpredictably. Truly, though, Last Kind Words was much more deeply tragic than frightening. The pace was slow, and the scenery artistic. The whole thing just felt so sad. All the misery, the pathetic lives, all the perpetuated violence, made the film feel whistful, and heartwrenching. It was too gentle (in plot progress, if nothing else) and too human to frighten me. It reminded me of lynch photography (for obvious reasons), and struck me not for its supernatural/unnatural danger, but for its entirely understandable, if sometimes overwhelming, pain. As Sam Winchester says once, "they're just people!" And people do horrifying things to other people. And it bre...

This 2013 (remarkably recent) film possesses a fine example of my favorite pet peeve - the failed beefgeek. Seriously, putting an over-tanned beefcake in pathetically large and decades out-of-date glasses does not make him capable of performing geekery. If you want us to believe your character scored over 2400 on the SATs, hire an actor capable of pronouncing technobabble, and then GIVE HIM TECHNOBABBLE. (I mean, provided you can write it. If you can't write it - just stick to what you know. Write average characters). Really. Technobabble is SEXY. Why do you think we all go nuts for Benedict Cumberbatch? It isn't his cartoony lips, I swear. It's what comes out of them. Although: points for making your character look incapable of slapping somebody hard enough to make a sound. Sorry to start a review on a low-note. As a thriller and a mystery, this film passed! It was at least average, if not slightly above on the "smart protagonist" score (that chick was written st...

This 2002 horror story was entirely adequate, although (and this is difficult to say, because I have always hated people who say this) not actually very frightening. The storyteller/director made an interesting decision to keep the nature of "them" and the fate of their victims from the audience until the last few moments of filming. That decision makes sense, because the explanation doesn't allow for the characters to discover it: they're not some legend that can be googled, which is a nicely realistic, if sort of frustrating touch, because it doesn't allow any intellectual movement - which impedes plot movement.  We WANT to know what things are and what they want. Words like "eat us" are thrown around, but without any kind of substantiation, even at the end. People just disappear, after being very, very frightened. Although understanding the nature of a thing makes it less frightening (which clearly isn't the direction to go, here), even progress t...

This priceless gem is about two old guys who teach some geeky YAs that the only way to be truly happy and find yourself is to have (at least) one wild night of sex, alcohol, and violence. I'm interested in the parallel between the BBRCs and the drunk/vulnerable scene, but I'm not a fan of comedies generally. Don't ask me to gush, because you won't like the liquid I choose.

This review is NOT approved for all audiences. I'm not sure there's much to be said for a movie about a guy who animates his phallus. I'll keep it short. Although the physical acting was solid, and Brendan Frasier and Bridget Fonda both offered entertaining performances (if somewhat unexciting), the images were too much Roger Rabbit and not enough Tim Burton, although the sets and effects were often full of potential. I mean it was necessarily juvenile, but that fact itself made the story unemotional. It became impossible to identify with the characters, which is a huge tragedy, because Bridget Fonda. She always oozes sympathy and wit, and in this role, though we clearly took her side, she merely filled a generic "girlfriend" slot. Let's talk about the gender issues. Clearly, if you're going to turn your penis into a cheeky monkey (so many things wrong with that sentence), you have to be a guy, right? Because Freud was right: women don't have one. Dude...

It's not quite a heist film. I mean, it very much is. I mean, sort of. There's certainly a heist, and some good planning, but I think the heist film genre requires the thieves to be the protagonists, which they are, I mean the good guys, which they're not. Sort of. I mean. . . I don't think this film needs a review. It's a dark comedy classic. Sir Alec Guiness spends the entire film doing a brilliant Alastair Sim impression, and Peter Sellers does as little acting as possible, which still leaves him 100% chameleon, though not looking very comfortable as a flashy, gun-toting thug. The place at which the character of Mrs. Wilberforce is possible fascinates me, though. The setting is contemporaneous with the film's production, so early fifties. The writer was American (Missouri, according to IMDB), though he lived in England to write his screenplays. His admiration of the Victorian woman is incomparable. Was he borrowing a stereotype, or did he personally like to ...