Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
Shock Corridor (1963; Samuel Fuller) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes In his 1963 film Pierrot le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard cast B-movie deity Sam Fuller as a Fuller-esque partygoer who declares, “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, death…In one word, EMOTION.” It’s ostensibly a Godard line, but […]
Chairman of the Board (1998; Alex Zamm) GRADE: F By Daniel Barnes It is quite common in vulgar juvenile comedies for the hero, usually a socially maladjusted and borderline deranged man-child, to be found irresistible by beautiful (usually blonde) women. Whether it is the lascivious skirt-chasing of Harpo […]
Krippendorf’s Tribe (1998; Todd Holland) GRADE: F By Daniel Barnes *Rewritten from a Dare Daniel review published on The Barnesyard blog on November 14, 2005. Tim Conway’s legendary Dorf character was a bumbling Germanic dwarf who waddled his way through a series of faux-instructional videos in the 1980s […]
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964; Billy Wilder) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes Dean Martin occupies a fascinating area in the American imagination. He is famed for being a lecherous boozehound, yet there is nothing he could have done on the screen or in public to stain his crushed velvet […]
Claire’s Knee (1970; Eric Rohmer) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes In my review of La Collectionneuse last week, I made this admission about French auteur Eric Rohmer, a director whose work I had never seen before this festival: “Rohmer makes movies that I want to kick off my […]
How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014; Dean DeBlois) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes “Decreased Stakes” Perhaps it is unfair to hold a film sequel up to the light of its predecessor, but How to Train Your Dragon 2 fairly groans with the strain of stretching a cute concept […]
