I Have a Review Site, Too

Some of you might remember that I have a review site, Goatdog's Movies. Once in a while, I actually review movies on it!

The Queen is a pretty good TV biopic with one hell of a lead performance (Helen Mirren, who deserves an Oscar and will probably get a Goatie). The film is being overpraised, but it's worth watching for Mirren, and for Michael Sheen's interesting take on Tony Blair (back when people liked him).

Blackboards is one of my New Year's Resolution movies (four down, 23 to go!). It's my first Iranian film. It makes an interesting point about the relative value of education, but then it keeps making it, in much the same way, over and over, I suppose in case you missed it the first few times.

The Torch features some crazy/wonderful camera work that anticipates Sergio Leone's style.

And Desperate Cargo is a completely forgettable poverty row action film without much action. It's my first viewing from the box set I recently acquired. I hope it's not predictive of the rest of the set—there must be a couple of gems in there. Right?

On a related note, I got my first-ever Oscar screeners: Thank You for Smoking and The Last King of Scotland. I still can't seem to get invited to any Chicago preview screenings, although I did get an invitation to a bunch of screenings in New York.