I recently watched the entire first season of Portlandia on Netflix streaming. Prior to this, I had never heard of the show. It began last year on IFC (Independent Film Channel), which, along with the Sundance Channel, is one of the few cable channels that provides alternatives to the generic Hollywood blockbusters that dominate most [...]

The Last Big Thing (1996), newly released on DVD I first saw The Last Big Thing shortly after it was released, some twelve years ago and thought it was brilliant and hilarious. Amazingly enough, it still holds up today. On the DVD cover this film is described as a “scathing satire of modern-day Los Angeles.” [...]

This is a movie I started watching with very modest expectations, given the gimmicky sounding premise (an alternative world where lying is unknown). The film surprised me with funny and original satire, and the promise of a possibly insightful look at the very concepts of truth and lies. Mark (Ricky Gervais) is an average, perhaps [...]

The Babysitters (2007) Director: David Ross Starring Katherine Waterson and John Leguizamo The Babysitters is a curious movie that is entertaining yet doesn’t quite achieve coherence. It could be a dark satire about modern suburbia, an amoral, hedonistic comedy about teenage prostitution or a cautionary, moralistic tale about teenage prostitution. Instead of settling on one [...]

Comedies have always been popular, but most fall into a sadly limited number of categories –romantic comedy, teen comedy, sophisticated type comedy, and so forth. That isn’t to say that some of these films cannot be entertaining and quite funny. But as as this site is mainly about independent films, I thought I’d take a [...]