Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Inland Empire 2006

  ★★★ Rewatched 28 Jan 2025

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  When I was a teen, I thought this was great, but when I tried to rewatch it in graduate school, I couldn’t finish it.

  This was my second complete viewing; it took me several settings to get through it all.

  I think it was a mistake for Lynch to shoot it on lesser-quality digital. Laura Dern is fine, but Lynch doesn’t give her a strong story to work with, so I found it difficult to get involved this time.

  To…

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  Women in Love 1969

  ★★★★ Watched 26 Jan 2025

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Probably the best of Ken Russell’s films that I’ve seen. A very good film that comes close to greatness but I’m not sure if it quite gets there.

  I loved the passion and anger in the relationship between Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson’s characters; we have to wait 80 minutes for their intense first sex scene but it’s worth the wait. 

  I did not think Alan Bates and Jennie Linden had as much chemistry and I thought their sex scene…

Popular reviews

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  Jonathan Livingston Seagull 1973

  ★★★★★ Added 7

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=P817PgBqfmg

  For the first time ever in his career making movies, Hall Bartlett knew exactly what he was doing. He was adapting a best-selling novella by Richard Bach about a prophetic seagull, and he was going to turn it into a major motion picture. It was going to be an independently financed film with as little studio interference as possible. And by the end of the ten-month shooting schedule, Bartlett had mortgaged his home and invested his savings into the…

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  David Wants to Fly 2010

  ★★★½ Added

  As one who practices Transcendental Meditation, I found this documentary both entertaining and disturbing. Personally, I enjoy practicing TM, but this documentary does confirm my suspicion that the big business surrounding it is dubious at best. Was Maharishi a disciple of Guru Dev, or merely his bookkeeper? And if so, what right did he have to capitalize on TM instead of sharing it with the rest of the world for free? And how can Maharishi's alleged dream of "World Peace" ever be accomplished when TM is so ridiculously expensive?