Mean Creek (2004)

Posted on February 13, 2005 by Felix Vasquez

If you could snap your fingers and make your school bully disappear, would you? That is the question posed here in this chilling tale of revenge called “Mean Creek”. Sam is beaten by the school bully George one time too many, and now Sam’s brother and his friends are intent on seeking revenge on George by luring him out to the river and playing a nasty prank on him, but things go horribly wrong. Much like “Deliverance” being a tale of paranoia and the mind becoming the worst enemy after a tragedy, “Mean Creek” is a younger more contemporary tale of an incident spawning a tragedy which has dire consequences.

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My Life Without Me (2003)

Posted on November 26, 2004 by Felix Vasquez

This is a beautiful portrait and character study of life and death, and is pleasantly heavy with symbolism. It also observes one persons attempt at achieving personal goals she never could do, or have the guts to do in their life. The lovely Sarah Polley plays Ann, a workaday woman who is a janitor for a school and goes home to her trailer with her husband and two daughters living a mostly simple life with her overbearing mom and life she’s pretty comfortable with. One day during work she starts getting sick and goes to the hospital where her doctor tells her she has an inoperable tumor and is slowly dying. Somehow Ann seems prepared to face death and the concept of death here, and it doesn’t take much time for her to accept her death and that her daughters may grow up without a mother, thus she begins to really live life while she begins dying.

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Coffee and Cigarettes (2004)

Posted on November 5, 2004 by Guest Contributor

This movie has a lot of quirky, funny moments. Iggy Pop Meeting Tom Waits, for instance, and just jawing about whether they’re on the jukebox or not, and the White Stripes talking about Tesla coils and the resonance of the earth. It’s an arty film, and if arty films are your bag, you’ve found the right place. If you like Jarmusch, you’ve also found the right place. There are a number of recurring themes that resound nicely. Certain cups, certain patterns on tables, and certain lines of dialogue are mentioned.

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The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

Posted on October 10, 2004 by Felix Vasquez

“The Magdalene Sisters” takes place on 1964, the heels of the women’s liberation front where young women realized their sexuality and did so through protest, standing up for their rights, and burning their bras showing they wouldn’t be constricted sexually through man made products, yet here we visit a village in Ireland where women’s liberation hasn’t quite caught up. If anything “The Magdalene Sisters”, a well acted and very well directed film, analyzes the constriction of women in Ireland and how utterly one – dimensional their values were. It’s more of a film centered completely around ignorance and not only about religious ignorance, but social ignorance, and paranoia that the slightest thing will destroy the religious function and faith.

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Sylvia (2003)

Posted on October 10, 2004 by Felix Vasquez

While Paltrow does manage to give an inspired performance that shows effort, the problem with “Sylvia” is it romanticizes someone who was obviously stricken with a horrible mental disability. As always, poets and singers who manage to commit suicide are portrayed as people who have done something elegant, a deed such as suicide is portrayed here with such a fantastic and dreamy nature and never does it focus on the sheer extreme results such as misery. This manages to romanticize suicide and takes a woman who had obviously a mental illness and makes her seem as if suicide was a grand gesture to end her misery when in fact it was just sad.

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The Secret Lives of Dentists (2003)

Posted on September 26, 2004 by Felix Vasquez

Slater: These children are monsters, they should be struck… can I hit them?
David: No.

In “The Secret Lives of Dentists” we get a glimpse at the life of a dentist no one really sees, the life of a dentist, a person who people fear once they sit on the chair preparing for a check up, he’s the person, as character Slater says, everyone hates and no one wants to know because all they want to do is sit down get their work done and get the fuck out. David, played by a serene Campbell Scott, is the very submissive dentist who follows his usual daily routines and is always enveloped in his career. When he returns home he is very enveloped in the raising of his three daughters, one of whom clings to him like an extra limb and refuses to acknowledge her mother.

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Swimming Pool (2003)

Posted on August 29, 2004 by Felix Vasquez

Sarah, a renowned author making a decent living with a series of books with the character of Inspector Dorwell somewhat shies away from the throws of recognition and seems to hate almost being worshiped. She’s experiencing a creative meltdown of a sorts and is sent by her publisher, with whom she’s having an affair with, to his country house in the far end of France away from civilization to work on her new book, though she isn’t sure what she’s writing yet. She gets more than she bargains for asking for inspiration when her publisher’s daughter Julie comes to stay at the house unannounced. The two instantly dislike one another, and are exact opposites; Sarah played by the elegant and stunning Charlotte Rampling is a somewhat withdrawn, cold and uptight woman while Julie played by Ludivine Sagnier is stunning, very, very sexy, seductive, adventurous, and very mysterious, but the two don’t like each other.

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