Village Vidiot

Funny comedy by Mike Judge based in part on his “Milton” shorts. Three cubicle rats working at ‘soulless inc’. Two are being fired, one promoted for no reason. Very funny stuff and the thing with the stapler is quite good. Still it feels like and is a cartoon come to life. One of Jennifer Aniston’s…

Funnier than anticipated boxing movie about a Don King clone who finds another great white hope and uses him well. It’s good on race, sports, and class

Funded via Kickstarter, this Charles Kaufman weirdly lifelike animated piece follows Michael Stone, an analyst and popular writer on customer service (David Thewlis voice) through his day and appearance as the key speaker at a conference of customer service managers. He is, quite literally in his dreams, falling apart and that serves as the perfect…

Fun look at the abortion issue with Laura Dern and a fine cast. It suggests that both the pro and anti-abortion forces are basically the same in their attitude and tactics. Funny and horrifying in part. Dern is a great doper loser shown in all her glory. Good work by lots of folks including Burt…

Fun Japanese girl-band movie. When a high school band’s guitarist gets hurt, the three girls in the band need a fourth, a lead singer. They select (at random) a Korean exchange student with limited Japanese. This is a wonderful film about teen life in Japan. There are no parents (well, mom makes a birthday cake…

From what I understand, while filmed in part in Russia, this one is now banned there. Based on a comic book of the same name, this Armando Iannucci (director/screenplay) dark historical comedy-drama shows Stalinism as both nightmare cult of personality and terror reaching deep into Soviet life in 1953. A terrorized Mafia frat boy culture…

From the same folks who brought you. the very funny “Hott Fuzz”. This one includes Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, and Pierce Brosnan having a very good time. I enjoyed this smart, formulaic look at a reunion gone terribly wrong, or maybe right. Old friends get back together to try to accomplish the ultimate…

Frederick Weisman’s new film is a non-narrative documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet company. It follows the development of both classical and modern work through rehearsals to performance. It shows both the hard work of these amazing athlete-artists and their personal role in bringing a vision of the work to life. This is a remarkable…

Fred Rogers and his neighborhood are the subject of this loving study of Mr Rogers. I am probably the only person in America who never watched his show as an adult with a child. The closest I came was Eddy Murphy’s brilliant ghetto satire of the show. Our daughter did not really like TV very…

For the most part, this was an interesting documentary look at the Fame and Muscle Shoals recording studios and their driving forces, Rick Hall and the Swampers – Hall’s studio musicians until 1969. Hall’s genius was to bring black and white musicians and performers together to create some of the greatest pieces of soul of…

First, I am not a huge fan of comic book cinema. I liked the first “Iron Man,” the darker Batman films, and, I must admit, the first “Superman” although I’ve never been able to believe a man can fly. That said, I really enjoyed this huge hit of a film. Written and directed by Ryan…

First the good news, Josh Brolin is very good as the young Agent K in this overly sentimental, Etan Cohen-written, Barry Sonnedfeld-directed, Spielberg-produced time-travel version of the franchise. He has all of Jones’s fun ticks down and is a looser character. The bad news is, Tommy Lee Jones looks about 80 in the contemporary portion…

Fine piece with wonderful acting about the last days of James Wales (Ian McKellin), the director of “Frankenstein,” “Bride of F” and other Hollywood films, who simply stopped directing. Follows this washed up director as he relives his memories of old life and gay loves, his crush on his straight pool man (Brendon Fraser in…

Fine piece by the same filmmaker who did “White” and Red”. Indeed, this is the first of the trilogy. It follows the widow of a composer who, along with his daughter, are killed in a car wreck. Her struggle to overcome the emptiness of their loss and to confront the awareness of his affair that…

Fine film with great work by Lily Taylor as Veronica Salonis, the woman who shot Warhol. Cold, weird look at art, feminist rage, lesbianism, and NY in the 60s. A nice, strange, and unsettling piece of work. Well acted. See this film!

Fine fantasy piece about a man whose very life is a TV show. He doesn’t know it. Raised from infancy as living theater, Truman doesn’t know his whole life is a show. Brilliant commentary about the nature of TV, our lives as passive viewers, our willingness to use others, our capacity to delude ourselves into…

Fine 2003 Alejandro Innerita (he of “Amores Peros”) directed film staring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro (“Traffic”) with an outstanding piece of smaller work from Melissa Leo as Del Toro’s wife. Wow, where to start. Separate lives brought together through a car wreck, rather like “Amores Peros”. Also, death and salvation are the…

Finally made it back into the theater to see a film. We went to our local Venue (that’s its name) and wanted to see “Tinker, Tailor” but it was sold out so we saw this. Clooney was very good as Matt, a workaholic lawyer with Hawaiian royal roots and mucho family land whose wife is…

Finally got the damn DVD set up with all sorts of aid from Radio Shack. Anyway, the first film we watched was this Disney animated piece about a mammoth (Ray Romano), a sloth (John Legquizamo), and a sabertooth tiger (Dennis Leary) trying to lead them into a trap at first to steal the human baby…

Filmmaker Jafar Panahi (“The White Balloon” and “Offside” are among films of his I’ve seen) has been under house arrest in his beautiful spacious, upper-middle class, modern, well-appointed, multi-story Tehran apartment for months awaiting a verdict by the appeals court for his conviction for political subversion carrying a 6-year prison sentence and 20 year ban…

Film 5 in the series is the darkest yet as Potter and his crew set out to fight Voldemort and his minions. Good and edgy but all the magic in this movie can’t rival the small and terrifying magic of “Pan’s Labyrinth”. Still, this is a fun film. The young actors are now young adults….

Fascinating use of 3-d film technology, glasses and all. You feel like the bugs are around you, you’re in this James Cameron film that is up for loads of Oscars tonight. The plot ranges from cartoon-like presentation of the evil colonel in the service of the rapacious corporation and its amoral managers in space to…

Fascinating realist Belgian film about an adolescent boy, Igor, at the fringes of petty crime with his father. They smuggle and house illegal aliens. The accidental death of one of these aliens (Hamidou, an African whose wife has just arrived in Belgium) forces Igor to choose between his buried moral self and his father, a…

Fans vastly preferred “Thor Ragnarok,” but I favored this more traditional superhero tale of Batman (Ben Affleck) getting the old band, well, new band together, with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) , Flash (Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Mamoa), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) to fight Steppenwolf and his flesh and fear eating minions – no, not the cute…

Excellent, very funny, warm Muppet film about Gonzo trying to find his roots. Fine sound track, really cute, and fine fun for the whole family. B+ and I really laughed a lot. B- sometimes found parts a bit scary, but in the end, liked it a lot. Truly a film the whole family can enjoy