Side Orders #2

Here we go with more clips, previews and other fun stuff: I think, from now on, I'll start these Side Orders posts of with an opening from a movie I like. Now, when most people cite great credits sequences, they're usually in that Saul Bass/Kyle Cooper mode of thinking--animated graphics and the like. But what about the ones where the graphics aren't the whole magilla? Case in point: the

Film #41: Dad, Can I Borrow The Car?

When I was about nine years old, I tuned in to The Wonderful World of Disney one night to watch what I thought would be your typical Disney fare--cartoons, or a live-action adventure with li'l prairie dogs, or even a faboo tour of Disneyworld (an episode kids always wanted to see). Instead, what I got was something that blew my mind, and I hope it blows yours. But first...I was never a big fan

TriBeCa Diaries #9: Dying Breed

I had talked about seeing the film with a very sweet publicist earlier in the day. But I had forgotten about Dying Breed when it came to showtime. I had settled on seeing Harmony Korine's new film Mister Lonely instead, even though earlier in the day I had run into someone who said it sucked. I felt I should give Harmony another chance. He had, after all, written Kids. And though I disliked

TriBeCa Diaries #8: Green Porno

It's perfection, having the always extremely erotic Isabella Rossellini as the focus of Green Porno, her eight-film debut as director (along with co-director Jody Shapiro). The subject of these charming, inventively educational one-minute shorts?The sex lives of insects. In each, an elaborately costumed Rossellini portrays a bug--a firefly, a house fly, a spider, a snail, a bee, an earthworm,

Tribeca Diaries #7: The Autuer

WARNING: This is a salty-languaged review, by necessity. Writer/Director James Westby has certainly gotten off the most raucously received movies at the 2008 TriBeCa Film Festival with The Autuer. This brilliantly-constructed pastiche of mockumentary and true narrative storytelling posits the existance of Auturo Domingo, the world's foremost director of hardcore porn, the Kubrick of cum. Played

TriBeCa Diary #6: Bart Got A Room

I didn't come to TriBeCa to slag any movies, but I lost my patience with the contrived Bart Got a Room about 45 minutes in, and I just had to say something. At first, it looked as if I'd like Brian Hecker's somewhat hateful new film. It opens to Danny Stein (Steven J. Kaplan) as he's playing in his school swing band for a smatterling of beach-tanned senior citizens. It's a promising opening,

TriBeCa Diaries #5: The Wild Man of the Navidad

When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez unleashed Grindhouse on us in early 2007, it was an essential orgy of nostalgia dressed up in zombie violence and car-chase-mania. It was an exhilerating experience for anyone who'd gone, back in the day, to the drive-ins and--yes--the grindhouses to catch Death Race 2000 or Dawn of the Dead or God Told Me To. It seemed to get every detail right--the

TriBeCa Diaries #4: Run For Your Life

I stepped into Judd Ehrlich's Run For Your Life not knowing anything about the history of the New York City marathon. I stepped out an educated man. The event was started by a charismatic, Romanian-born businessman named Fred Lebow, whose enthusiasm for running began the marathon's infancy in 1969. At that time, people on the street weren't used to seeing runners jogging alongside cars in clothes

TriBeCa Diaries #3: Empire II

Dedicated not to Andy Warhol but to late film geniuses Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, Amos Poe's new experimental documentary Empire II still owes a lot--including its title--to the white-haired pop artist. Warhol's 1964 film Empire was an 8-hour black-and-white shot of the top half of the Empire State Building. It was a quizzical experiment that I suppose had to be done, but of