Quite a bit of sensation about this film as it not only won praise at the various film festivals in which it was shown, but for the striking performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal (sister of Jake Gyllenhaal a.k.a. Donnie Darko) as the somewhat mentally unstable Lee Holloway who finds stability through an SM relationship with her boss played by the ever quirky, but always fun to watch, James Spader…

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Check out Hyper the winner of the Best Short Short, 2003 Aspen ShortsFest.

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It’s summer which means one thing, blockbusters. With that in mind, I figured it was time to put my love of “indie’s” on hold and give the number one summer movie of 2003 a try. So, I grabbed up my cousin’s 14 year old son and headed to an over air conditioned theater to watch Bad Boys 2. For those who are uniformed, Bad Boys 2 was rated R for restricted, which means that any person over 30 is not allowed in the theater without being accompanied by a teenager (unless you sneak in by wearing teen clothes and humming a new Justin Timberlake song.)

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In a comment on the review of ‘Basic’ on this site, Weefselkweekje mentioned a phenomenon called ‘Eyebrow Acting’. ‘An overly expressive use of facial muscles more suited to miming than screen acting’, was the best description I could find.

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The last good spoof movie I’d seen before this one must have been “The Naked Gun”, starring Leslie Nielsen. He’s made so many really bad movies since then that he kind of gave the whole genre a bad name. If this movie hadn’t played as Sneak Preview at my local cinema last year I probably wouldn’t have seen it. When I did I liked it so much that I rented the DVD last night.

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Tom Ripley (John Malkovic), is an art dealer, among other things. He’s wealthy, successful in many ways, and resides in a small Italian village. But his past catches up with him. Reeves (Ray Winstone) a former accomplice, wants Ripley to help him get rid of some mafioso. He threatens to take Ripley down with him, if he’s exposed by the mobsters.
That day, Ripley attends his neighbor’s birthday party. Neighbour John (Dougray Scott) insults Ripley, who at first does nothing, but Ripley comes up with a cunning plan … a game.

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Choking on Popcorn started out only a couple of months ago as Suzero and Weefselkweekje’s personal movie weblog. The idea was to review every movie we saw, whether it was on TV, at the cinema or on DVD. This way we could warn eachother about bad movies and recommend good ones. It seemed logical to put it on the web to enable other people to read what we thought about these movies as well and some of our friends joined in and became regular ‘reviewers’. The contributions of those friends is what has really put the meat on our popcorn.

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For a Hollywood blockbuster-oriented movie fan, I’ve seen quite a few French movies lately. And I liked all of them tremendously. The French seem to be the absolute experts on “feel-good” right now, with the delightful “Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain” for instance, or “Le Peuple migrateur”, a great documentary about migrating birds. So when my friend Elsbeth suggested we should see this film, I was easily convinced.

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’24 Hour Party People’ is a film about the Manchester music scene, spanning some twenty years from 1976 and including bands like the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and the Happy Mondays. The story is told (literally, to camera) by Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), a television presenter and music promoter who founded the Factory Club, Factory Records and the infamous Hacienda club.

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Not being a great von Trier fan, I had not yet been inclined to watch Dancer in the Dark but as Pip happened to have it on DVD and I am a Catherine Deneuve fan, I thought I’d give it a go after all. Having been warned it was a musical, but also very dark and tragic, I had absolutely no idea what to expect.

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