CINEMANIA:

Primer (2004, USA, Shane Carruth) AKA Time is on My Side

A little Memento meets a whole lotta La Jetee, Primer is the first film I’ve seen since David Lynch’s nearly-impenetrable but clearly-brilliant Mulholland Dr. that I have wanted to re-watch IMMEDIATELY. I have restrained myself from doing so, and this review is based upon a single viewing, so forgive me if I get some things wrong; this is just the sorta film that will do that to you.

So for starters we have Aaron (writer/director Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), a pair of ambitious and industrious 20-something engineer-types who work 50 hour weeks in the office, then spend most of their remaining waking hours toiling in Aaron’s garage on their next Great Scheme, a prototype for Who the Hell Knows What.

Oceans 12 (USA, 2004, Steven Soderbergh) AKA It Takes One to Know One

All right, so it’s three years later, and the crooks who made away with a casino’s worth of dough in the original have been tracked down, one by one, by the casino owner Terry Benedict (Garcia), who demands the money back (with interest) or dire consequences will rain down upon the perpetrators.

Polar Express (USA, 2004, Zemeckis) AKA Six Flags Magic Mountain: The Movie*

My full-length review's up at Apollo, so I'll only add a few scattered notes here. The film's gorgeous, that's for sure, and Zemeckis does a great job of turning the first half of his movie into a carnival ride, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of constructing a complete narrative, the wheels fall off at about the half way point.

Corner Gas (David Storey, 2004, Canada) AKA There’s Not a Lot Going On

Way back in January of 2004, 1.2m Canadians tuned in for Corner Gas’s series premier, which is apparently pretty much unprecedented for the first episode of a Canadian-based TV show, and just goes to show that you can’t take too seriously the prevailing wisdom that what’s popular cannot possibly be any good. So listen up: Corner Gas is not only good, it’s bloody well great.

The nice people at Kino recently released a six-pack of one of my favourite filmmakers, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and so in this section of me blog I will be discussing four of the man's early and mid-career efforts: The Scar (1976), The Camera Buff (1979),No End (1985), and Blind Chance (1987).

100 Films That Made Me Sit Up and Take Notice

Recently, we at Cinemarati, given the mission to make a list of 100 film using as our guide the instruction to choose the films that are most important to each of us, with whatever that might mean to each member being left intentionally undefined, decided to update our film canons, which has given yours truly an opportunity to revisit my first canon submissions by checking out great films, some for the first time, others for the umpteenth, to see ho

All righty, it's an off night in the World Series (can you believe the Sox won both games despite committing EIGHT errors? The Yanks must be wondering just how the hell they lost to this team), and I actually got to see a film in the theatres, so excuse me while I bend your ear a little about Team America: World Police (2004, Trey Parker) AKA Blame Kim Jung-Il!

Meisters of the savage skewer, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, whose South Park TV show has, since 1997, set the standard for balancing hil

Okay, lissen, bear with me, cuz I promise that I will get back to the movie reviewing game sometime very soon, but right now nothing out there gives me the shivers like watching some post-season baseball, and this year's edition kicks ass; we've not only got the most remarkable one man show this side of Barry Bonds or dinner theatre with Hal Holbrook, in the person of Houston's Carlos Beltran, but also the most unlikely of comebacks, a historical first major league baseball-wise, as the cursed a

Code 46 (2004, UK, Michael Winterbottom) Big Brother’s Brave New World

Complex and cold, intelligent and aloof, fascinating and off-putting: Code 46 is one of the year’s most interesting films, with images and ideas that will stick with you for days, even if the movie lacks the sort of emotional resonance we might hope for in our masterpieces.

Shaun of the Dead (2004, UK, Edgar Winter) AKA Harold and Kumar go to the Winchester Pub

In 1978 I saw THE zombie movie. For me, that viewing experience of George A. Romero’s brilliantly bloody Dawn of the Dead did such a stellar job of combining bitingly incisive and hilarious social satire with imagery of near-unrivaled gruesomeness that this film raised the bar for zombie flicks so high that most filmmakers in that genre have been content to limbo beneath it ever since.