Letterboxd — Your life in film

What...what is...why...? George of the Jungle was part of that weird boom in the late '90s/early '00s when studios tried to make a live-action hit out of every beloved cartoon: The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Inspector Gadget, Scooby-Doo, Dudley Do-Right, etc. (What kind of fucking bet did Brendan Fraser lose that he wound up playing both George and Dudley?) I watched this for the lulz with Will. He'd seen it before, I hadn't...yet we were both surprised by how utterly…

Unlike most Marvel movies, Iron Man 3 has a third act that builds up a good head of steam and really works. It's those first two acts which threaten to sink the whole thing. Shane Black seems like a good choice on paper, but in execution, it becomes clear why he's not: he pushes Tony Stark way too far into Kiss Kiss Bang Bang snark. I'm torn between thinking that Robert Downey Jr. telling a little kid not to be…

From what I'd heard, I expected a lot worse than this. I won't claim Identity Thief is a good movie, but when you pair Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy as an uptight do-gooder and an explosion of vulgar insanity, respectively, there are gonna be some laughs. And there are. By the time it settles into its road movie shtick, I was pleasantly surprised. Unfortunately, it tries to be five different types of comedy at once. Besides the aforementioned road movie…

I didn't like J.J. Abrams' first Star Trek, but it had energy and interesting character dynamics and an actual story. Star Trek Into Darkness, however, is as sloppy and underwritten a summer blockbuster as I've seen in the last few years. Abrams' quick cuts, which were annoying the first time around, here make everything go by in the blink of an eye. It's weightless, shapeless, in-one-eye-and-out-the-other filmmaking. A bunch of stuff happens but it doesn't feel like anything really happens.…

Good, cheesy, quasi-philosophical fun. Kathryn Bigelow had already done better (Near Dark, yo) and would go on to become the Oscar-winning director of great films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, but she stages the action here with her typical verve. In particular, there's a raid on a house full of gun-totin' surfer punks that's like a primitive version of ZDT's raid on the bin Laden compound. The surfer mysticism is pretty goofy, and stabs at depth with Keanu…

This is one of the most gorgeous films I've ever seen. Photographed by Henri Alekan, responsible for such beautiful films as Roman Holiday and Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, its visuals have a distinctive, transportive quality I've only rarely experienced before. It doesn't hurt that Wim Wenders has masterful control of his material, taking us to Berlin as seen through the eyes of two angels. We witness everything they witness: those who are suicidal, lovelorn, happy, nostalgic, hopeful, depressed. Wings…

Terry Zwigoff's first film is a brief--little more than an hour--documentary about Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong, who at the time led the world's only remaining black string band. Louie Bluie shares a surprising amount in common with Crumb, Zwigoff's 1994 masterpiece, in that it follows an idiosyncratic artist obsessed with his own sexual fetishes and in love with old music. Of course, Armstrong, born in 1909, is a practitioner of "old music," and one of the most fascinating things about…

Though writer-director Jeff Nichols' debut Shotgun Stories remains unseen by many--it made only $45k at the box office--it was one of the first movies to put Michael Shannon on the map. Shannon stars as Son, whose alcoholic father named his brothers Boy and Kid; you can see how much attention he paid them. Dad gave up the drink, found Jesus, and had another set of boys with a different woman. But Son's clan remembers the son of a bitch that…

I don't know anything about Michael Bay beyond the fact that he makes really awful movies. That doesn't necessarily mean he's stupid--a lot of smart people make bad movies--but again, I don't know. The one thing I have been able to gather from his work is that the man isn't very self-aware. Loud, pointless explosions crash into one another while quote-unquote "human" characters act like supermodels or doofuses, depending on gender, and none of it is very humorous. Oh, he…