A memoir of what living in The Soviet Union was like in the 60s and 70s. Bukovsky spent most of that time in prison camps and mental institutions. His big contribution was exposing the use of psychiatric evaluations to label dissenters as mentally unfit for trial. Despite being the harrowing nature of his predicaments, he makes it seem like routine daily life in the U.S.S.R.
I’ve never actually seen a Buster Keaton movie until this. Holds up very well and has some great scenes of Buster trying to outrun boulders and a mob of angry brides.
This starts as an engaging thriller and then tricks you by turning into a teary drama. A lot of the movie relies on an underwear-clad child actor and Brie Larson’s zits. Both do outstanding work.
This was a movie that I really wanted to see. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley, who made the gangster-hybrid stunner, Kill List. The premise is great: a gun deal goes bad in the first fifteen minutes of the film and what follows is one gigantic standoff with bullets flying and dialogue shouted from behind cover. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite live up to expectations. The characters aren’t particularly interesting and neither is their cross-talk. In the hands of Tarantino this could have been a masterpiece. As it is, it’s fairly entertaining but the direction gets confusing and there’s no sense of the tiny space in which the action takes place. You never really can tell who’s shooting from where.
A sci-fi film about a bunch of space squids that communicate with coffee rings. Another blockbuster that steals plot elements from “The Demon with a Glass Hand” episode of The Outer Limits.
This would have been much better if it were just a cartoon instead of this live-action/CGI mess. There are tons of original visual ideas but the execution just looks stupid. Why in Buddha’s name would you CGI a monkey face when a rubber mask would look a zillion times more realistic? Still, there are some fun moments between the incoherent plot points. Nothing will match the opening twenty minutes of the first Journey to the West.
I bought this knowing neither the composer nor the movie. It was cheap and had an interesting cover… never a good metric for making a music purchase. For the most part this is an okay soundtrack, but is lacking the off-kilter dissonance of other Italian soundtracks of the time. I thinks it’s a little too piano-heavy for my tastes and main title sounds a bit too much like the theme song from The Young and the Restless.
This Shaw Brothers kung-fu swordsman epic is a bit of an overly long mess. The “heroic” characters are kinda jerks who deserve what’s coming to them. The film is most noteworthy for its bloody drawing and quartering scene. Expands finger painting to a whole new level:
I listened to the audiobook version which features many of the original cast members reprising their roles. The book itself is somewhat of a disappointment and cheapens the mystery of the series by dwelling way too much on U.F.O.s and L. Ron Hubbard. If you are looking for answers, this ain’t the place.
As much as I like horror, I am woefully unfamiliar with many of the classics of the genre. Amazon was offering this one for free so I finally made time to see it not really knowing what to expect. It’s definitely not the gore-fest that the title would imply, but the off-camera suggestion of violence is pretty disturbing; especially in the matter-of-fact in which the killer commits his acts. The movie suffers from some amateurish performances and limited character development, but otherwise holds up incredibly well and provides some genuinely creepy moments.