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Tag Archives: Film

Dr. Rated-X or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the MPAA Rating System

by Rob Friesel

What to say about Doctorow‘s write-up of This Film Is Not Yet Rated? My inner libertarian is screaming out: “Heck yes! Fuck ’em and their so-called ratings! Vive le Rated X! Vive le NC-17!” And there’s a lot of compelling reasons to rally around those cries if what he’s saying about the film are true. […]

Dopamine

by Rob Friesel

Just don’t. Our new subscription to Blockbuster’s DVD-by-mail-to-compete-with-Netflix plan has us high on the opportunity to cheaply take risks on films we’d otherwise normally stay away from. Anyway, imagine our conflict… With a title like Dopamine, how could we possibly stay away? But with a description like: …In San Francisco during the economic heyday of […]

recent media round-up

by Rob Friesel

Brokeback Mountain. Very average. Maybe just hyped to the point where it couldn’t possibly deliver? I must say that I walked away pretty numb. Acting performances were in the “good” to “excellent” range and it certainly started well enough. (The first 30-45 minutes are brilliant.) Unfortunately, it can’t keep its own pace and slows down […]

3 films in short

by Rob Friesel

28 Days Later. About as expected zombie-ish flick with a twist. Decent premise and a whole lot of suspense (though a bit over the top at times). Take that animal rights activists. Hidalgo. Better than expected but still glad I didn’t catch it in the theater. Half-blood late-19th century cowboy tears ass across the Arabian […]

50 Greatest Indy Films

by Rob Friesel

Via Boing^2 (via MeFi): Empire’s 50 Greatest Independent Films. It seemed to me like there was an awful lot of blood, horror, and schlock – – but maybe those are some of the hallmarks of great indy cinema? I was surprised to see Slacker in there (well… sort of surprised) and surprised that Primer was […]

“the greatest postmodern art film ever”

by Rob Friesel

Neat article on Slate: “Star Wars: Episodes I-VI – The greatest postmodern art film ever” (by Aidan Wasley)… …Lucas takes this self-consciousness about narrative artifice a step further: He makes explicit his theoretical interest in the mechanics of plot. […] characters come to understand that there is another agent, external to themselves, that is dictating […]