Movies

I went to college at Northern Illinois University, a large state college outside Chicago. At NIU there was a building right in the middle of campus where large gen-ed lecture classes were held. Cole Hall probably held around 1,000 people when full, or at least that is how it seemed at the time. I spent [...]

(Note: I found this draft of SIFF Day 10 sitting in my draft folder and decided to publish it as is. More news soon buds.)
I was thinking about what to say about Tsai Ming-Liang’s new film I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone when I discovered this review by Scott Tobias over at The Onion AVClub, [...]

Here is how it works: copy this list. Leave in the bands you’ve seen perform live. Delete the ones you haven’t and add new ones that you have seen until you reach 25. An asterisk means the previous person had it on their list. Two asterisks means the last two people who did this before [...]

Now that beer-retard has basically dared me to finish my SIFF blog, I pretty much have to don’t I? This day got off to a great start with the German film The Cloud, a big budget disaster movie about a nuclear accident combined with a teen love story. I loved the first half of this [...]

This was beginning of the downturn, for the next week damn near everything was mediocre to bad, which sucked after seeing quite a few films I actively liked early on.
I read a bit about Anthony Hopkins’ directorial debut Slipstream online before the screening and everything I found used the term “self-indulgent”. Sadly none them were [...]

I made a conscious decision this year to avoid “issue” documentaries. No killing in Darfur, no climate change is going to kill us all, no the rants about how the government is going to hell. I know all about this stuff, I know it sucks, I’m sick of hearing about it frankly. Especially in a [...]

I expected to enjoy King Of Kong, a documentary about a Redmond man attempting to break the world record score at Donkey Kong. I did not expect it to be my favorite film of the festival, but it was. Easily. It could have been boring, like every other damn doc that showed this year, but [...]

So I have pledged that I am going to go through and day by day reconstruct SIFF as if it were still going on until done. This is my pledge to you my reader!
So today was our first film of Secret Fest, and it was probably my least favorite of the four. I will not [...]

The day started out badly with Waiter from Denmark, a shoddy entry into the “character in a script comes to life” genre. Lesson From SIFF: When a movie’s description draws a comparison to Charlie Kaufman, stay away. This whole thing has been done to death in the last few years, and far better than this. [...]

Here we are! The first offical day of SIFF (well, the second day of SIFF but the first day for me.) Only one program tonight, Roya and I made our way down to the SIFF Cinema for An Evening With Lisa Gerrard. This involved a talk with Lisa and then a screening of the documentary [...]