Movies

Kurt Turns Evil (2008) Norwegian 3DCG animation. Kurt is a forklift driver who wants to be respected, like the braggart doctor next door, or the huge-breasted Prime Minister. When he comes into a gigantic amount of money he Turns Evil, and it's only when he proves himself as a great forklift driver that he can find true happiness. Extremely eccentric, witty, well-designed and entertaining. Outstanding comedic timing, but just a wee bit too fast for my aging brain to drink in all the glorious offbeat detail. 9/10

Anime

9 (2009) Post-apocalyptic 3DCG adventure makes the standard error - all the energy was put into making every single thing intensely detailed and totally, totally "cool" looking, and none was left over for making the plot anything other than a string of cliches, or making the dialog anything other than meaningless noises meant only for effect. A few days later I had completely forgotten that I had seen it. 2/10

Umi ga Kikoeru [The Ocean Waves] (1993) I have read that this was a project meant to give the younger artists and animators at Studio Ghibli an opportunity to do their own feature film. It's essentially a high school melodrama, but it develops some real thoughtfulness and sensitivity by the end of the story. The art and animation are of the highest quality and it is inoffensive overall. 5/10

De Profundis [From the Sea] (2007) Spanish-made art film - extremely beautiful, long, slow and soporific. So much so that I have been unable to finish watching it. Most of the animation is computerized morphs back and forth between two or three drawings, with some cutout motion thrown in. It becomes, stylistically, very repetitive and ultimately unwatchable. 0/10

Doggy Poo (2003) Korean stop-motion animation, half an hour long, about a small dog turd lying in the road and what he learns about the world from a blob of mud, a drifting leaf, a chicken and a dandelion. Simultaneously touching and hilarious, a strange and unique work of pure genius. Everyone should see this. 10/10

Movies

Murder, She Said (1961) Margaret Rutherford is Miss Marple in this adequately entertaining film. Its only real peculiarity is its harpsichord/twist theme song. 7/10

Movies

Il Bidoni [variously The Swindle, or The Swindlers] (1955) Co-written and directed by Federico Fellini. Broderick Crawford is a con man running cruel swindles that rob poor people of their life's savings, and Richard Basehart appears as one of his associates. This shows the beginnings of his stylistic separation from the realist school and the development of his wandering narrative style. The more freakish aspect of his later work is undeveloped here, but characters and settings are slightly skewed. Interesting and entertaining overall, especially as one begins to think Crawford's character may be developing a conscience. 7/10

Movies

Julie and Julia (2009) If I had known before I sat down to watch this that it was written by Nora Ephron I probably would not have. This is a kind of stupid movie mashed together with a very stupid movie, and just when you start enjoying or really hating one, they switch over to the other and you can hate or enjoy it for a while. Then it seemed to go off a cliff and every moment was torture and I knew I couldn't sit there watching that for even one more minute. So I made it through over an hour, and I thought Meryl Streep was great, and was sorry Meg Ryan can no longer play 30 year olds, because this was really a Meg Ryan movie but the substitute wasn't bad. Anyway, I thought it kinda stunk and don't give a damn how it turned out. ?/10

Movies

The Man Without a Body (1957) I believe this is the strangest of all "head on a table" movies. Millionaire with a brain tumor wants to have his brain replaced with the brain of Nostradamus. That alone is just ridiculous. The ancient mummy head of Nostradamus is revived and kept living on a table, then transplanted whole onto a living body, held on with a huge blocky plaster cast, making it the craziest head transplant monster ever since being transplanted to a body makes the previously talkative and erudite Nostradamus Head into a shuffling incoherent stranglemonster. Grand finale is astonishing, leaving me literally slackjawed in amazement. Completely nuts in that boring "head transplant movie" way. 8/10

The Beatniks (1960) Radio actor and voice artist Paul Frees wrote and directed this rock/crime exploitation cheapie. Familiar face Peter Breck gives one of his multitudinous crazed oddball performances as Mooney the beatnik psycho. Adequate. 6/10

Movies

A Serious Man (2009) A Donna movie, about a guy whose life keeps getting worse and the only time it seems to get better is when it is just about to get a whole lot worse. Kind of more interesting to see than to think about afterward - I remember being very entertained at the time, but now I am not entirely sure why. Coen Brothers movies are a hit and miss thing with me and even when they hit I am not really their target audience. Interesting to see all that hyperjudaic suburbanism, and I liked the way the story kept seeming like it was going to veer off into some kind of crazy genre adventure but always yanked itself back to the grim reality of crushing the protagonist under the weight of the world. Extremely well-made, yet their films don't seem to leave much residue in my mind, the way many more trivial things do. 7/10