Author: Village Vidiot

This made lots of “best of” lists in 2002, and I think it’s a tad overrated. Still, both Bronwen and I liked this road/buddy/older woman look at youth, sex, politics, and (this is Mexico, after all) death. A pair of stoner high-schoolers, one rich, the other a scholarship baby (r is it the absent daddy’s…

This lovely, humane, touching and disturbing, comic Dogma film from Denmark looks at the various people who are taking an Italian class together. It’s the lightest and cheeriest of all the Dogma films I’ve seen and is marred only by the overly happy and optimistic ending. The disturbing piece involved issues of fetal alcohol syndrome…

This is very much Sondheim talking about Sondheim An HBO documentary, it examines the greatest living American musical composer/lyricist through his many interviews and shows while concentrating on six classic songs and shows It is a remarkably open look at his life, his painful youth saved through friendship and love in the home of Oscar…

This is probably really going to irritate people, especially those who are more film savvy than I am. I know this is one of the most beloved films ever made and, for many folks, one of the best – if not the best – comedies ever made. So, why did I find it sort of,…

This is part two of the trilogy. It’s Frodo’s attempt to get the ring to Mordor but intercepted by men; the uprising of the trees (the Entwives), the stand of the horse people and the renewed alliance of the elves and men. Bronwen was rather bored with all the violence, but I loved the movie….

This is not a docudrama. It is a fascinating, painful dramatic exploration of the fourth 9/11 plane featuring the uprising of the hostages. It portrays a system caught with no plans for such eventualities and VP and Pres very much not in evidence or in charge. Quite fascinating, especially about the air traffic controllers and…

This is another weird, funny (in a totally dark and embarrassing way) and painful film from Tod Solenz, who also gave us “Welcome to the Dolls House” and “Happiness”. It is two stories of unequal length, dealing with the creation of art and storytelling. One is about fiction writing, where an insecure, young, white and…

This is another slow, or perhaps stately, film. It looks at the 8 French Trappist monks in Algeria who became pawns in the games played by the Islamists who waged war on the Algerian government. Much of the film is the simple presentation of the work done by these men: the farming, prayer, cooking, honey…

This is an interesting look at the issues of modernization versus traditional family values in China. A successful, modern Chinese businessman hurries home when he receives a cryptic note from his retarded brother and thinks his father has died. The father and brother run a traditional men’s bath house in a big city. It is…

This is an interesting look at an Irish criminal, Martin Cahill, who stole over 60 million dollars worth of jewels, paintings, and materials in addition to private burglaries. A brutal man of ascetic tastes (he raises pigeons as a hobby), he marries one sister and beds another, demands loyalty and punishes an apparent rat by…

This is an extremely formulaic war movie with some remarkably standard plotting and dialogue. It stars Brad Pitt as tank commander Sgt. Don”Wardaddy” Collier as he and his crew including “Bible” (Shia LaBeuf), “Gordo” (Michael Pen~a), and “Coon Ass” (Jon Bernthal) are part of the assault on Germany in April 1945. The Shermans struggle against…

This is an excellent, very weird David Lynch film about fantasy and reality and the confusion between the two. Although I am writing this months after seeing the film, it sticks with me for its amazing twists on dreams and reality, its use of actresses in double roles, in reality that turns out to be…

This is an excellent, funny, cynical look at drug use and abuse in Scotland. It is a great treatment of class. Scary about the drugs, crime, and the emptiness of modern life as a consumer. A really fine film. Very rough. See this one

This is a well-meaning and very traditional newspaper film that makes more than a few structural and cinematic bows to its Ur text, “All The President’s Men”. Excellent work from Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachael McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, and Stanley Tucci as the ‘real life’ journalists and the plaintiffs’ lawyer who broke the…

This is a well-made (Kevin Spacey produced) film about the origins of Facebook, the personal betrayals and the programming and college scenes. It’s also Mark Zukerberg as genius-nerd asshole or genius-nerd social moron or genius-nerd with Aspergers Syndrome or a genius-nerd idiot savant asshole with Aspergers. Is he like that or just played like that?….

This is a very interesting look at Idi Amin’s (Forest Whittaker) reign in Uganda, charisma and sociopathology meet and destroy a nation and a young Scottish doctor seeking to live life to the fullest. Fun to see in Bahrain in a luxury theater Well acted, especially by Whittaker, who absolutely channels Amin. It’s an amazingly…

This is a very good movie by Thomas Payne (“Citizen Ruth,” “Election,” “About Schmidt” all reviewed in this list) about the road trip by two unsuccessful former college roommates, one a failing novelist cum English teacher (Paul Giamatti “American Splendour”) and a failing soon-to-be married actor (Thomas Hayden Church) through the central wine district in…

This is a very fine and serious Australian film about the shameful period from 1930-1970 where the Australian government stole the mixed race children of aboriginal women and ‘reeducated’ them to civilize them and eventually encourage their deracination. It chronicles the journey of three young girls as they attempt to run away and return to…

This is a very dark, depressing, and sad look at Bob Crane’s (Col Hogan of Hogan’s Heroes) decline into sexual addiction and the need to be filled in the act with the help of John Carpenter, a video freak and salesman who facilitates Crane’s relentless search for young adoring women. Coming out of a straightlaced…

This is a tough film to describe. It’s also a pleasure to watch. It is sly, smart, civilized, and very humane. A very lovely, small American independent film that follows Peter Dinklage’s Fin, a very isolated dwarf with a personal and professional interest in trains, as he inherits a shack of a train station in…

This is a surreal, fascinating and horrifying look at the gangsters who murdered 25 million communists, dissidents, bystanders, and citizens of Chinese ancestry in Indonesia in 1965. Acting as paramilitaries, they slaughtered men, women, and children with impunity. But this documentary follows these sociopaths who see themselves as society’s only ‘free men’ today, as they…

This is a scary and disturbing, yet gripping drama about a young computer genius who is trying to find the numerical hook for predicting stock market fluctuations. In the process, he both achieves his goal and attempts to find the numerological/kabbalistic hook into the Bible. Wonderfully played in stark black and white with all the…

This is a remarkably well-acted, very tense, painful film about two terribly lonely women teaching at a municipal secondary school in England. Judy Dench (Oscar nomination) plays Barbara, a cold, bitter, and vicious history teacher (what else!) who lives primarily via her journal, which she keeps religiously. She’s positively Victorian (or even Regency) in her…

This is a remake from a very popular series of films from the 1930s and again in the 1960s about a blind swordsman (Takeshi Kitano) who wanders around the country as a masseur. He stumbles into a village ruled by two warring gangs of murderers and thieves. He also encounters two siblings one woman and…

This is a marvelous one-woman production by Anna Devere Smith. It looks at the aftermath of the Rodney King trial and riots in LA. She does all the characters: African-American, Chicano, Korean, Euro-American. Not always kind, it is nonetheless insightful and honest. See it!