May 2006 Reviews

Joli Mois de Mai

Here are the reviews I'm working on for this month.

Amazon: Clean (Olivier
Assayas and Maggie Cheung--
together again!), Awesome; I...Shot That! (Beastie Boys concert shot by fans), The Golden Girls - The Complete Fifth Season [three-disc set] (my third Golden Girls review), The 4400 - The Complete Second Season [four-disc
set] (character-driven sci-fi series from Francis Ford Coppola's
production company; I also reviewed season one), An Unfinished Life (Lasse Hallström with Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman),
The Devil's Miner (intimate doc about a young Bolivian miner),
The Closer - The Complete First Season [four-disc set] (TNT
de-
tective drama with Kyra Sedgwick and J.K. Simmons), Like Mike 2 - Streetball, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? - The Com-
plete First Season [three-disc set], and Elizabeth I (HBO-
Channel 4 mini with Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons).

Resonance: Various Artists - Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited.

Seattle Film Blog: SIFF press screenings began on 5/1, so I'll be writing more reviews than usual between now and mid-June (the fest runs 5/25-6/18). They'll also be shorter, though I reserve the
right to ratchet up the word count whenever something like, say, last year's The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard's audacious take on James Toback's Fingers) crosses my path.

So, here's the haul for this month, including four non-SIFF-related
titles: Classes Tous Risques, Pusher II - With Blood on My Hands
(with the marvelous Mads Mikkelson), Crossing the Bridge - The
Sound of Istanbul (music doc from Head-On's Fatih Akin), Draw-
ing Restraint 9 (Matthew Barney and Björk), The Road to Guan-
tánamo (Michael Winterbottom is back...as he is every year), Sev-
en Swords (fantastically inert actioner from the legendary Tsui
Hark), Love Streams (final go-round for John Cassavetes and
Gena Rowlands), and Festival (sketches of Newport Folk).



Endnote: Clean image from Offoffoff.com.