For the past three years, Rochester filmmaker Matthew Ehlers’ short films have been selected to be part of the Sundance Film Festival. At the 2004 Festival, January 15 to 25, he was there promoting his most recent entry, a three-minute comedy called Who’s Your Daddy? Ehlers kept a diary of his journey: 10 days filled […]
Movie Reviews
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Recapturing the past with violence
The producers of The Butterfly Effect open the movie with a prose epigraph citing the familiar statement from chaos theory about the beating of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the planet eventually leading to hurricanes on the other, as if that notion explained their picture. In reality, the movie owes more to […]
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Good fun in the sun with Shirley
Residing in a city with a film festival that has trouble getting its big name honorees to show up (failure might be impossible, but so is luring Pam Grier and Lainie Kazan to Upstate after Columbus Day), it practically made me giggle to hear that the 6th annual Sarasota Film Festival, which wrapped this past […]
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Understanding the life of a painting
Although the movies naturally love painters, they frequently tend to concentrate on the more familiar names and the more flamboyant lives, which explains Charlton Heston painting the Sistine Chapel in The Agony and the Ecstasy and Kirk Douglas lopping off an ear in between painting sunflowers in Lust for Life. In Girl With a […]
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Hollywood’s trying to wink at us
I have two smiles. One comes from seeing a good movie. The other comes from seeing a funny movie. Neither smiles made a special guest appearance during my screening of Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! This is a picture we’re supposed to swallow as satire; the filmmakers think this two-bit, hare-brained, fleabag of an […]
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The bohemian and the insurance man
Judging by the slender but still depressing evidence of the endless series of coming attractions that precede the two new comedies, Chasing Liberty and Along Came Polly, and the movies themselves, the American film industry apparently decided upon January as Moron Month. The trailers provide much more than a simple glimpse of the pictures […]
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Monster party at the theater
All you really need to know about Monster (opens Friday, January 23, at the Little), the new biopic about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, is that Charlize Theron’s gut is this year’s version of Nicole Kidman’s nose. They were both highly publicized alterations to ordinarily extraordinary-looking women in an attempt to bury them deep within the […]
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The first daughter on the lam
Sometimes the serious contemplation of contemporary cinema leads one down the dark and winding path of depression and despair. The release of Chasing Liberty, a movie apparently intended as a vehicle for the alleged pop singer Mandy Moore, prompts a measure of that contemplation and certainly a good deal more than a modicum of melancholy. […]
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Like you need to be cooler
If Owning Mahowny wasn’t a real story of a gambling-addicted, bad-luck protagonist who was ultimately incarcerated for embezzlement, its sequel might have been The Cooler (opens Friday, January 16, at the Little). This one is about a former casino junkie who parlayed his monumental bad luck into a gig where he’s paid to stand near […]
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Trading history for the future
Hollywood owes a considerable debt to the fertile genius of the late Philip K. Dick, the prolific science fiction writer whose work has inspired a variety of highly imaginative and highly successful movies: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and now, Paycheck. Unlike many of his colleagues, Dick concentrated on subjects and situations transcending the […]
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Sweet ‘Fish’ and bitter ‘Fog’
Tim Burton’s Big Fish (opens Friday, January 9) is a lot like that FedEx commercial where the young office worker suggests using the overnight delivery company to save money and then tells the story of his claim to fame over and over until the day he dies. Thankfully, the “story” in Fish is much more […]
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A touch of Homer in a grand American story
Although critics constantly announce their discovery of fashions and trends, as Senator Eugene McCarthy noted of the New Hampshire primary, what looks like ground swell may turn out to be merely a frost heave. It may seem remarkable, however, that two grand military epics set in the 19th century should open within weeks of each […]
