Overtime (Matt Niehoff and Brian Cunningham, 2011)

Overtime starts as a vague Tarantino homage before turning into a silly pastiche of various clichés over the course of its 80 minutes. Ultra-low-budget, the movie has all the usual issues of a homemade film: bad sound, stiff acting and nonexistent effects. And yet, I kind of liked it; the movie is so off the wall ridiculous in its bounce from half-baked idea to half-baked idea that if it never adds up to more than (or even equal to) the sum of its parts, at least it has parts to be added.

My full review is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

The Best Blu-Rays of 2012

To go with my favorite Criterions of the year, I put up my favorite Blu-Rays of the year over at Movie Mezzanine. Check 'em out.

Netflix Picks of the Week 1/4/13-1/10/13

Every week at Movie Mezzanine, Corey Atad and I pick three movies on Netflix Instant (me for the US, Corey for Canada). These posts will go up every Friday and include a newly added film, one set to expire, and then one we just want to highlight. Our first post can be found here.

Promised Land (Gus Van Sant, 2012)

All I gotta say is, when I get around to Elephant this year, it better undo a lot of the damage of Van Sant's last decade. I still haven't seen his largely ignored 2011 effort Restless, but it cannot possibly be worse than Promised Land, a smug liberal tract about going green financed in part by oil. For a brief time, it almost works, setting up the arrogant, manipulative natural gas company rep with an equally officious and pushy environmentalist, until a twist derails its vague hints of intelligence to set up a truly embarrassing, back-patting speech that may be the worst monologue of last year. Heinous.

My full review is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

The Best Criterions of 2012

Up at Movie Mezzanine, I've put up a list of my 10 favorite Criterion releases from the past year. It was a bit of an off year for the company, but it still put out some of my favorite movies and introduced me to some stunning new discoveries.  So head on over and check out my article.

New Gig: Movie Mezzanine

This morning, Sam Fragoso of Duke and the Movies launched his new website, Movie Mezzanine. I'm proud to say that I will be serving as senior editor and the head of the site's DVD/streaming section. Sam is a great guy with a lot of passion, and the team he assembled is superb. Many of my favorite bloggers are taking part, and I cannot wait to really get underway with this incredible staff.

We've hit the ground running with some year-end reviews, including a staff feature of our aggregated picks for the best of the year. Check it out to see our picks and blurbs (I cover Bernie, The Color Wheel, The Day He Arrives, This Is Not a Film and Moonrise Kingdom), and take a look at our individual ballots here (note: mine is slightly different from the one I put on this site because I removed undistributed titles).

My activity on this blog may drop in the future as I devote more time to Movie Mezzanine, but a lot of what I will put there would likely have gone here anyway. I will update this blog with any exclusive content, as well as any links to new articles elsewhere. So set your bookmarks for this exciting new site, and I'll see you there!

Blindspots 2013

It may be presumptuous of me to plan for another year's worth of Blindspots posts when I still have two more from 2012 to complete (expect one for The Long Day Closes within a week and Judex...well, later). Still, these are some films I've meant to watch for some time, so perhaps writing them down here will prompt me to get to them. As with last year, I'll cover one a month at random (save for the horror film meant for October). The films are as follows:

All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)

By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, 1936)

Duelle (Jacques Rivette, 1976)

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)

French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955)

Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964)

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

Too Early, Too Late (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1982)

Trash (Paul Morrisey, 1970)

Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)