All Things To All People
Film & DVD Reviews
Earlier this year, the largest video store in the United States, Scarecrow Video had a Kickstarter to help fund its survival and conversion to a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of video. Of course, being a film-loving Seattlite, I was just…
The world has so many unique cuisines, so it was inevitable that one day, two would go head to head: if you love Indian food, if you love French food, if you love food in general, this movie is to watch ASAP. “The…
Can a movie about grand theft be heartwarming? I wouldn’t have thought it, but Jake Schreier’s 2012 film Robot & Frank is. Frank Langella plays Frank, a retired criminal with a knack for figuring out break-ins — who’s also suffering from a…
Back in the 1990s, the arcades were brought back to life thanks to a game called Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. The popularity of the game and its characters told anyone versed in the laws of business that spin-off media was…
Sometimes with documentaries, length can be a hinderance. There’s such a thing as too much depth, and they can tip from fascinating to boring. Other documentaries, like From Straight To Bizarre about the other acts on Frank Zappa’s labels in the late…
If you want, you can picture an image of the Pokémon Slowpoke with the words “Hey, The Great Dictator is a great movie!” around him. After all, the movie came out in 1940, and was a critical and commercial success. So you…
It’s interesting to me how sometimes if a film is too good, you can’t say much about it. For example, this weekend, I watched two films — Fantastic Mr. Fox and Evil Roy Slade. Of these two movies, Fantastic Mr. Fox is…
Cardiacs were a wonderful band — pretty much any given lineup of the band is going to be awesome, but the lineup on the All That Glitters Is A Maresnest concert film is probably my favorite lineup. Or at least one of…
When I was waiting to get into the Roxie Theater in San Francisco last Friday night, some people got into line behind me and immediately began chatting idiotically about how terrible the movie was going to be. “This is going to be…
“What’s wrong with me, Mom?” Superman is an icon of comic books. Superhero comics, and arguably comics in general, are what they are today partly because of him. Had he not come along, comics as we know them would be something altogether…