vhsparrow

Member since 6/12/2007, last signed in awhile ago.

""I didn't mean it like that...""

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Personal statement:

Spout has triggered something unintentional for me – between the screeners I've been viewing and the laundry-list of reviews I've written over the years, I was 'inspired' - that is, a pal called me on the phone and yelled at me for half an hour and told me that I ought to set up my own personal film-blog.

So, falling back on some of the stuff I've written for Spout and the backlog of reviews that I'd posted in other places, I launched Cineblog.us in January of 2008.

I've put it out there as my own personal shingle, though I've got some review support from my filmmaker-pal Anne Daugherty.

So, if you like what I've posted here on Spout, come pay us a visit a visit at Cineblog!

And thene there's that inventory of crap over on my own homepage, victorsparrow.info...

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Interested in: No particular genre

vhsparrow's movie tags

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Sun Dogs

Would the SPCA approve?
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. [What do you think?]
"This was a pleasant surprise -- not necessarily a good film, but more interesting than I expected Far from a cruel parting gift from Javier, this was an interesting, affirmative film, but it was both mislabled from a marketing standpoint and mismarketed as a sports film.As many of the film's subjects exclaim at the beginning of the film, Jamaica had a bobsled team, which became the subject of Disney's 'Cool Runnings', but 'Sun Dogs' is neither fiction, nor comedy -- it is a documentary by director Andrea Stewart, who sought to make a film about the efforts of Danny Melville and Devon Anderson to save some of the Bahamas stray dog dog population in by putting the dogs to work in some meaningful way.Perhaps the dogs could have been retrained as guard-dogs, seeing eye dogs or drug seeking animals? All of this are viable canine careers, but training the animals as sled dogs (instead of putting them to sleep) seems something of a flamboyant stunt.Then again, this whole enterprise was co ... " [More]

Hancock

'Tonight He Is Overcooked'
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. [What do you think?]
"For mre coverage read‘Hancock’ started it’s journey to the screen 12 years ago as a spec-screenplay by first-timer Ny Vincent Ngo, titled ‘Tonight He Comes’. I first learned about Ngo’s screenplay through some fanboy site like Harry Knowles’ AintItCool.com. Ngo’s script created something of an uproar in Hollywood despite comic book properties being at a fallow moment after Joel Schumacher’s assumption of the Batman franchise with ’s ‘Batman Forever‘ (1995) and the revolving door that the title role became after the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton. ‘Tonight’ launched a bidding war and got Ngo signed by CAA, jump-starting Ngo’s screenwriting career and several premium-cable writing gigs. But along the way, the script also got the attention of Writer-Producer Akiva Goldsman who bought the script and subsequently doctored it to fit his number one screen-doctoring client, Will Smith. Out ... " [More]

Africa Unite

A celebrity travelogue and not ...
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. [What do you think?]
"This film is a strange confab of celebrity travel souvenir and retrospective of the Rastafarian movement on the occasion of Bob Marley’s 60th birthday. Much of the surviving Marley clan is featured here — Ziggy, Rita, Cedelia, Damian and Julian — there’s music and interviews. And more interviews — interviews with lots of people who just happened to show up for Bob’s birthday celebration down in Ethiopia. There’s Danny Glover, Angelique Kidjo, Lauren Hill and others but the participants here seem to be fighting over Marley’s legacy as much as celebrating it. But the title of the film is ‘Africa Unite’ and NOT ‘A Posthumous Celebration of Bob Marley’s 60th Birthday’. Though the film doesn’t come together as a cohesive narratve or a document of an important event, it does feature a few good, informative moments for people unfamiliar with Marley and/or the Rastafarian movement. Notably, Haile Selassie&r ... " [More]

Summer Palace

Meticulous but ultimately disap ...
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. [What do you think?]
"Unlike other reviewers, I was disappointed with Summer Palace. That's not to say that there aren't impressive things going on in it -- it just seems that my expectations became distorted after what seemed to me an elaborate and meticulous emphasis on direction and production design to refer to European nouvelle vague films that goes entirely nowhere. In the disk's promotional blurb, the film is described as a first-hand account of Tianamen Square in Beijung, c. 1989. The film's writer-director, Lou Ye apparently participated in those protests back in the day, but the film does very little to communicate exactly what those students were after -- was it more 'democracy'? More civil rights? Greater freedom of self-expression? The film may have been forbidden to cross those thematic threshholds on account of domestic funding, but what Lou Ye starts to create is a visually compelling film that self-consciously references French and Italian cinema of the 1960 only to sputter out when it ... " [More]

Dead and Buried

Exumed from 1981!
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. [What do you think?]
"Wow, wow, wow -- I guess this movie *is* as obscure as I expected if there's only an All Movie Guide summary of it up here. First of all, credit is due to where I discovered ‘Dead & Buried‘, on the Video Nasties Project, which is a blog created by some fellow named Ben who has the temerity and no doubt the stomach to pursue the 79 B-movies that were banned by the British Nanny State after the invention of the VHS player in 1979. A list of all 79 of the ‘banned’ movies is available here, but as we all know, just because something is banned it doesn’t mean that college kids and high schoolers aren’t going to figure out a way to smuggle the item home from the Continent or that long summer vacation in the US. For some reason, each of the 79 movies on the VNP list got the dander of right-wing British pols like Mary Whitehouse, a member of the British equivalent of America’s Moral Majority. Importantly, Whitehouse was interesting in prohibiti ... " [More]

'Video Nasties' Blog now up!
By vhsparrow in HORROR MOVIES 101
"Hey now -- I'm writing in to report a new Film Blog in the wild that's well-worth paying some attention to: 'Ben' (no last name) has started the Video Nasty Project, whereby his goal is to watch and review the 39 of the 79 movies that were banned in the UK after the passage of the 1984 Video Recordings Act. Of course, the VRA was all about keeping gory movies out of the hands of impressionable youth after the invention of the VHS player and the sudden availabilty of lost-at-the-theater fare like 'Bloodbath (1971), 'Cannibal Apocalypse' (1980) and 'Xtro' (1982) but there are also a few hidden treasures in there, like Sam Raimi's 'Evil Dead' pics and a sudden new favorite of mine, 'Dead & Buried' (1980) written by the illustrious Ron Scusett and Dan O'Bannon -- you know, the guys who wrote 'Alien' (1979) and 'Lifeforce' (1977)? At the very least, the Video Nasty Project might only be a source of crappy, new '80's-era B-movies for you and your pals to incorporate into your weekend ... " [More]

Stephen King's The Mist

A Good Start, But A 'Missed' O ...
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
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"Now don’t get me wrong, here — ‘The Mist‘ (2007) was adequately executed, beautifully shot and well cast, but Frank Darabont ought to have done more to haul the premise of Stephen King’s novella out of the ’50’s. I used to be a King fan way, way back and read a good few of his books back in my junior HS days. I even followed some of his adaptations for a while — his adaptations from other people’s ideas and other people’s adaptations of his work — but that was before Frank Darabont started making his filmazations. From the commercials that advertised the movie last fall, it looked as though ‘The Mist’ was going to be a King-remake of John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog‘ (1980), which seemed entirely unnecessary and redundant to me, considering we’d just had a widely panned ‘Fog’ remake in 2005. Lo and behold, ‘The Mist’ was based on a 1980 novella — early, as f ... " [More]

Minority Report

Well worth watching again
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
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"With the Eliot Spitzer bust and talk of the NSA’s ‘Total Information Awareness’ program back in the wind, I was compelled to take another look at Steven Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report‘. I’d seen the movie and written another review of the movie back in 2002 and wasn’t so impressed with it — I felt that Spielberg had taken the Philip K. Dick material and slicked it up just a bit too much. When Ridley Scott adapted ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep‘ (cf. Blade Runner’ (1982)), he made an exerted attempt to ground his story in a world we’d understand, a polyglot, super-ethnic place that had felt the pre-millenial bleed-in from Hong Kong and other portions of east Asia. Even if Minority Report is set in D.C., it feels as though Spielberg’s future is a bit too squeaky-clean, a Googie architecture for the early 21st century. That’s not to say that Spielberg and his gang of futurist consultants didn ... " [More]

Wondrous Oblivion

Wondorous Credulity
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
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"So, Delroy Lindo. 13 years ago he was the one shining moment — an uncredited cameo in the otherwise execrable adaptation of Michael Crichton’s ‘Congo‘ — forget that Crichton has become a flack for the anti-Global Warming lobby. Hats off to Laura Linney and Dylan Walsh there and all, but Delroy stole your movie, even though his participation there was limited to all of 5 minutes of screen-time. 16 years ago, he was West Indian Archie in Spike Lee’s award-winning ‘Malcolm X’ (1992) adaptation, but what has he done between then and now? ‘Clockers’ in 1995, ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ in 1997, ‘Gone in Sixty Seconds’ in 2000, ‘The Core’ in 2003 and ‘Domino’ in 2005 — sure he’s been working, but in each one of those roles, he’s been relegated to supporting roles rather than the front-and-center position that one would think that he’d have earned by now. An ... " [More]

The Lookout

Scott Frank's directorial debut
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
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"Did anyone see any advertising for the directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Frank last year? “Scott who?,” you say — and that’s where the problems begin… The other sadness is that Mr. Frank, the award-winning writer of ‘Minority Report‘ (2002), ‘Out of Sight’ (1998) and ‘Dead Again’ (1991) got next to no promotional support for his debut feature. It was budgeted at $16M, took in $4M and slipped quietly beneath the waves 5 weeks later. Problem is, Mr. Frank’s feature shared it’s opening weekend with last year’s Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature ‘Grindhouse’ (2007) and it was released by the post-Weinstein Miramax and Spyglass Entertainment. So, given a choice between promoting a celebrated screenwriter in an open field against the brand-names Tarantino™ and Rodriguez™, Disney chose to punt. The unfortunate fact is that it’s a pretty good, if over-budgeted film, far ... " [More]

Out of Balance

Tom Jackson is no Michael Moore...
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
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"And that's just about the only place where this film falls flat. 'Out of Balance' is a concise, thoughtful condensation of the Climate Change issue that makes creative, if not authoritative use of interviews and stock footage to make the case for Global Warming and the damage than man has done to the Earth's climate. Tom Jackson has managed to package the science, politics and business concerns related to climate change into a coherent and persuasive film that's fully accessible to a general audience. In particular, Jackson tracks the history and growth of Exxon/Mobil, the largest publicall-traded oil company, taking account of it's failures, specifically that of the Exxon Valdez tragedy and the corporation's efforts to control and manipulate the social and ecological damage done by that accident. 'Balance' is a fine informational documentary replete with many valuable interviews with scientists, reserchers and stakeholders, etc. The film' ... " [More]

Charlie Wilson's War

Charlie Wilson is an un-person, ...
By vhsparrow in vhsparrow Blog
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"‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ is a tricky film to write on, because I have both a Proustian relationship with the material and a more generalized, historical appreciation for the the effort that writer Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols have accomplished.In fact, the week before I went to see 'Charlie Wilson' I was revisiting 1984 and discovered a scene that bears a curious similarity to waterboarding, with John Hurt on the table and Richard Burton alternately dousing Hurt and fiddling with electricity. That said, I fell into something of a fugue when David Bowie's "Let's Dance" spilled across the speakers for a key scene. In 1984, I was also a junior in high school, choking down Orwell’s complete body of work and fair measure of dystopian British fiction - Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and a good few Philip K. Dick novels. Even as the year 1984 came and went I wondered if the world th ... " [More]