Rambling Film

Just a little reach.. Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) is a hot shot journalist at The New Republic. He always finds the craziest, most out there stories. The only problem is, he's fabricating a bunch of them. And a rival journalist, Adam Penengberg (Steve Zahn) starts asking questions about his latest story, it puts a lot of pressure on his new editor Chuck. (Peter Sarsgaard) I've been meaning to watch this movie for years. It always escaped me, but now it's available on HBO Go so I, well....gave it a go. I'm glad I did. I love journalism movies and this one is fast paced and interesting as it should be. Sometimes it's hard to watch Christensen after being subjected to him in Star Wars , but like he did in Life as a House, he gives a good performance here. Stephen is not likable at all, but you can understand why others might gravitate towards him. The real star here is Peter Sarsgaard who add so much nuance to his character. He's immediately p...

This week's theme at Wandering Through The Shelves is a tough one. Non English TV shows. We had this topic last year and I ended up being a bit creative with it,and using shows that were originally in another language, but were dubbed over when I saw them. This time around, I'm going with a few shows in my Netflix queue that I haven't watched yet that I plan to. 1) Death Note My niece highly recommended this to me and it's an anime I've been curious about for a long time. And when I say recommended, I mean she angrily turned off the new Netflix movie version after 10 minutes and ranted about how the show was so much better.  2) Attack on Titan I watched a few episodes of this with my husband but never finished it for some reason. He loves it, and I liked what I saw. So this is one I'll definitely be revisiting.  3) Dark I love all things German and this is one of Netflix's newer shows. I've been in my queue for a while. I'll even...

Maybe it's all in my head. Sawyer (Claire Foy) has just moved to a new city to flee a stalker, though she still "sees" him everywhere she goes. She goes to a mental health facility looking for a therapist to talk to and winds up getting involuntarily committed instead. Then she finds that her stalker, David ( Joshua Leonard)  is working at there with her, or is she seeing things again? Hearing that director Stephen Soderbergh of all people is going to shoot a film on an iPhone is strange enough as it is. He has plenty of funds at his disposal, he can shoot on whatever he wants. So why the gimmick? Apparently atmosphere. Shooting like this makes us feel like we're actually right there with Sawyer. Like we're following her, locked somewhere we don't want to be with her, it's very claustrophobic. The graininess you see in the trailers is easily forgotten one you're fully immersed in the film. This is one of the best thrillers I've seen ...

Sleep out time! Alex (Marcienne Dwyer) is reluctantly tagging along with her boyfriend Nathan (Matt Dellapina) on a " Slasher Sleepout ." Part scavenger hunt, part escape room, horror isn't really Alex's thing. When people start actually dying, she finds herself really fighting for her life. I tend to have a good time with slasher movies. Many of them start to look the same so I appreciate when one like Ruin Me comes along and tries something different. It takes the fun weekend trope and spins it just a little to feel fresh. It's also littered with humor. I laughed out loud when resident douchebag, Pitch (John Odom) chooses Chaos as his favorite horror movie. Is there anything douchier then someone looking at Last House on the Left and going "I can do that, and grosser!" I'm not sure if that's how the director intended that exchange to be taken but I got a kick out of it.  This is pretty low budget so don't expect to be wowed...

Got needles? Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works in a facility that harvests celebrity illnesses so they can inject their rabid fans for top dollar. Want your favorite actor's herpes? There's a place for you! Of course, Syd can't play it straight and attempts to sell illnesses to shady side dealers by injecting himself before he leaves work for the day. This all backfires when he injects himself with a disease that kills their top client, Hannah Geist. (Sarah Gadon) Does anyone play shady white trash like Jones? I don't think so. He's perfect for this roll. Syd is a sleazeball but one you end up caring about despite the level of fucked up-ness that is his day to day life.  Director Brandon Cronenberg definitely shares a few of his father's traits. This film isn't over the top gory but the amount of needles you see going into skin is very unsettling. And this is coming from someone who has never been bothered by needles. Unfortunately even wit...

This week's them from Wandering Through the Shelves is nostalgia. Last week we talked about our childhood favorites, and this week is almost a continuation of that. Here are some films that make me feel young again. Edit: So, I think I may have misunderstood the theme. I think perhaps I was supposed to use movies featuring nostalgia, so let's just pretend Lando was nostalgic for the Falcon in Return of the Jedi. Everyone in Jurassic Park was nostalgic for when they were a kid and loved dinosaurs, and Robin is nostalgic for when he didn't have to babysit Bebe's kids.  1) Return of the Jedi Have I mentioned that I watched the original trilogy backwards for the first time? We had Return of the Jedi on tape, but we couldn't find Empire Strikes back. So I went ahead and watched it. Eventually we found our copy of Empire, so that came second. We never had A New Hope, so the first time I saw it was when they re-released them in theaters in 1997. Star Wars still...

What I knew going in: Apparently nothing.  A knight, Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow) and his squire (Gunnar Björnstrand) are returning home from the crusades when Block meets death personified. (Bengt Ekerot) He doesn't feel it's his time, so he challenges Death to a game of chess. As they play, their game affects the lives of others around them as the Black Death begins to sweep across the lands.  I know I've said this before, but Ingmar Bergman is a filmmaker who I was not aware of at all until I became a movie blogger. I was never very good at looking further back into the history of cinema to begin with, so when the Blind Spot opportunity came along, I've had a Bergman film nearly every year. Why am I bringing this up again? Because in my Bergman research I mixed this film up with a different one. See, I thought this was one of the films in his Faith trilogy, which I meant to finish after watching Winter Light . I keep a list of films I want to watch and I cha...