Rembrandt

I don’t know much about Rembrandt, the man, but I suspect that about 90% of this is bullshit, as it was in most biopics of this era … and often is to this day, for that matter. I do know that when The Night Watch was unveiled, the good stuffed shirt burghers of Amsterdam didn’t laugh. (How would they dare, in those ridiculous collars?) I’ve seen it, in the ... Read more »

Remember

A very interesting idea here, and really swell execution. Zev (Christopher Plummer) and Max (Martin Landau, looking about 105 years old) are residents at an assisted living facility, what we used to call an old folks home. They were both inmates in the same barracks at Auschwitz, the only survivors. Martin has worked with Simon Weisenthal to identify fugitive Nazis, and thinks he has ... Read more »

Rendition

“The United States of America does not torture.” George W Bush, November 29, 2005

LIAR!!!! LIAR!!! LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR BIG FAT STINKING LIAR!!!!
If you hire someone to murder, Monkey Boy, you are a murderer. If you hire someone to kidnap, you are a kidnapper. If you hire someone to torture, you are a torturer. This concept has been part of the ... Read more »

Rent

This is the famous “AIDS Musical,” and I was looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. I knew it was based on the Puccini opera La bohème, and I had heard a few songs from it on Sirius Broadway radio. None of them had particularly bowled me over. I knew that the author, Jonathan Larson, only 36 years old, keeled over dead right after the ... Read more »

Repulsion

I don’t think there is any film that takes you into madness as effectively as this one does. It was Roman Polanski’s first English-language film, and it is a perfect little gem. Catherine Deneuve is a manicurist who is losing her mind. She has deep sexual issues, we see her imagining being raped repeatedly, but is this the result of some incident in her past, or is it a chemical imbalance? ... Read more »

Rescue Dawn

For Werner Herzog, this qualifies as an easy shoot, in Thailand, involving not much more than poisonous snakes, leeches, and one puny little waterfall. Herzog is a madman, mostly in a good way, who is fascinated by the extremes of human behavior and survival. Here he tells the story of Dieter Dengler (and I’m sorry, that name just sounds nasty, doesn’t it? “Hey, your deiter’s dengling, ... Read more »

Reservoir Dogs

Quentin Tarantino arrived on the scene with a very bloody bang in this, his first film as director. In the very first scene he establishes something that I see in every one of his films. That is, no one writes dialogue like Tarantino. {No}} one. He has his group of thugs sitting around a big table, eating breakfast, and what do they talk about? The robbery they are planning? No, they talk ... Read more »

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

I’d intended to rent the first of these (of which there are now 3, one in theaters as I write this) but hey, one shambling flesh-eating zombie movie is pretty much like any other, right? In fact, there is only one shambling flesh-eating zombie movie, they just file off the serial numbers and re-make it three or four times per year. They vary only in the number of ... Read more »