Thursday, May 19, 2011

Rhyme and Reason and Rubber

My friend Jordan, who I've acted and created with in the past, always seems to have things on his radar that are completely outside of my time zone. When he kept recommending I watch this next little oddity, I challenged him to 'blog-buddy' it. He agreed and delivered. Enjoy!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Sighthound's Review of Rubber

NO REASON
A review of the Quentin Dupieux film “Rubber”
by The Sighthound

Rubber

France

2010

85 Min

Color

1.85:1

English, French

DIR Quentin Dupieux

PROD Julien Berlan, Gregory Bernard

SCR Quentin Dupieux

DP Quentin Dupieux

CAST Stephen Spinella, Roxane Mesquida, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Ethan Cohn,
Charley Koontz, Hayley Holmes, Haley Ramm, Tara Jean O'Brien, Remy Thorne

ED Quentin Dupieux

PROD DES Pascale Ingrand

MUSIC Gaspard Augé, Sébastien Akchoté, Quentin Dupieux

SOUND Zsolt Magyar

“All great films, without exception contain an important element of No Reason”.
-Lieutenant Chad

I’m afraid I’m very hard to impress, or engage anymore. I watch a lot of movies and as someone who has spent years not only in marketing but in car sales as well, I’m difficult to “sell” new ideas to. But from the very first scene, Quentin Dupieux’s “Rubber” had me engrossed guaranteed that I was going to watch every single frame of this crazy film about a lovestruck tire on a killing spree.

Caitlin's Review of Rubber

Wink, Wink, Nod Off by Caitlin Murphy

Several vintage stores line a section of Saint-Laurent, a busy street near my house. Their windows are chock-full of kitsch – the originally unironic belongings of now dead people, crying out to be reappropriated by Montreal hipsters with a keen sense of the fantastically awful. Lined up in a row, these stores seem to project a collective personality, exude a uniform attitude. And I often find myself hating these stores as if they were people. Smug people. In hawking their scavenged wares, they epitomize the celebration of all that is so bad, it’s good; so stupid, it’s smart; so ugly, it’s pretty; so dumb, it’s cool. It’s an approach to the world, to stuff, to being alive that seems easy to me, safe and boring, somehow self-entitled, and sometimes kinda slimy. I walk hurriedly by these stores, with a similar sense of recoil that I felt watching Rubber.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Blog-Daddy

A film about a father and his daughter, made by the filmmaking daughter of a filmmaking father... Seemed right to tackle this one with my dad.

I thought the car in the film was a Ferrari, but my dad refers to it as a Maserati. Knowing us, we are both wrong. Enjoy.

Dad's Review of Somewhere

Sofia, so subtle, so slow, so beautiful…. so what?
OR
What was big in Japan didn’t work in Milan

by Denis Murphy


So… after a fine Saturday night dinner, we (my wife Mary and I) screened the DVD version of Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere. As the final credits came up, Mary’s reaction was, “That’s the worst movie I’ve ever watched through to the end. It was like watching paint dry.”

Caitlin's Review of Somewhere

Got Anywhere Else? by Caitlin Murphy

Somewhere, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, is about a man who decides to (spoiler alert) move out of a hotel. Okay, there’s slightly more to it than that, but not much. The film is essentially 97 minutes of watching someone you don’t really care about stumble slowly towards an epiphany that is so banal it should be called something else.