I’m Not Dead

I know, I know. Shocking, considering it’s been nearly four months since I’ve updated. And I really have no reason for it. It’s not like I’m currently in school, so aside from work, I don’t really have anything else going on. You’d think I’d update this more. That’s the plan from now on. Here’s what I hope to have in the coming weeks:

• New marathon (I’m just going to pretend the last two marathons I’ve started and given up on didn’t exist…or they were by someone else)
• Reviews of Toy Story 3 and other big releases
• An update on my current Criterion/Eclipse status (this should be up sometime today)

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Big Fan

Robert D. Siegel, 2009

plot synopsis: Paul Aufiero, a hardcore New York Giants football fan, struggles to deal with the consequences when he is beaten up by his favorite player.

Unlike his breakout script The Wrestler, which created a real heart (and sadness) about the world of amateur wrestling, Robert D. Siegel’s sophomore effort (and directorial debut) never made me care about the fringe group of people he focuses on here; obsessive (sometimes scarily so) football fans. The script also can’t ever really seem to decide on it’s tone; is this a black comedy? A drama? Hell, a thriller? A lot of people have called the film disturbing, but I feel like whenever it came close to making me uncomfortable, really oddly placed bits of humor were tossed in to lighten the mood. On the acting front, Oswalt is fantastic; there’ s absolutely no denying that. If you’ve ever listened to a sports call-in show, you know how much he nailed this character. His interactions with his mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz) are particularly good. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast (his extended family in particular) never seem to come across as anything more than poorly drawn caricatures.

A film for the performance, and not much else.

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Third Time’s a Charm(?)

So I’ve started a full-on movie review blog. Obviously, I’ve tried this a few times in the past with less than stellar results, though I think that was because I tried to do full-on reviews of EVERY single movie I watched. Here, I will occasionally update with my current movie count for the year (this won’t be just a ’10 blog, hope to keep it going for awhile), but mostly I will choose only certain movies to devote full reviews to (new releases, movies I absolutely loved/hated, etc.) so I can put more thought/effort into each review instead of just trying to pump out as many as possible.

The first review(s) will be a special Halloween side-by-side double review/compare-contrast, between Ji-woon Kim’s 2003 j-horror film Janghwa, Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters) and it’s 2009 remake, Charles & Thomas Guard’s The Uninvited.

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