I'm sure they exist, but it's almost unfathomable to imagine a cinephile who does not count themselves as a fan of the work of Martin Scorsese. Out of the group of directors who came into their own in the 1970's, the decade that revolutionized the art of filmmaking, Scorsese is perhaps the most influential of them all (with the possible exception of Steven Spielberg). Scorsese's films, from Taxi … [Read more...]
War Horse opens with a man buying a horse at auction for more than it's worth, and more than he can afford, because his foolish pride won't let him lose. This, despite the fact that the sum he puts down is likely to cause him to lose his home and farm. It ends with a man buying the same horse at auction, and declaring that he will not lose, even if he has to sell his house and farm to keep … [Read more...]
As I walked out of the theater, my son (10) asked if The Muppet Show really used to be on TV, and you could see in his eyes that he was hoping it did, because then he could ask if we could get the DVDs. I told him it was, and recounted some of the memories of watching it every Sunday night. I could tell that I lost him somewhere along the way, as I tried to put together the idea of the weekly … [Read more...]
When undertaking the task of translating the life of a famous historical figure for the purpose of cinema, discounting adventurous "left field" attempts such as Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There, there are basically two approaches to take: the micro and the macro. The micro approach selects a defining moment in the said protagonist's life and puts it under close scrutiny, so that we … [Read more...]
Like all of Alexander Payne's efforts, The Descendants is not so much a question of what happens, but who happens, and the answer is once again related to a man who finds himself uncertain how to proceed due to the cruel and confusing whims of life. Of course, in the end, it is largely about the fact that men, apparently, view most of their manhood as a product of the points at which they draw the … [Read more...]
Unfortunately, despite taking its opening weekend, Tarsem Singh's Immortals seems likely to go as under-appreciated as his masterpiece, The Fall. Whether or not it manages to hold onto a solid fanbase, as is the case with the quite similar 300, remains to be seen, but critics have not taken to the film generally. Usually, the overall consensus of critics at large is something that I'm only … [Read more...]
How do you win a game when the rules are designed to make you lose?... Play a different game. For sports neophytes unaware of the finer points on how major league sports design their business models, Major League Baseball (MLB) runs its league according to the principles of social darwinism: every man/team for himself. Unlike the National Football League which operates as a legalized trust, … [Read more...]
Margin Call is a night in the life of a group of poor schmucks who work at multi-billion dollar investment firm. Set in the early stages of the 2008 crisis, the film revolves around the events following the discovery of an error in a predictive algorithm (or whatever) the company has been using to package stocks to trade as a single entity (or something). We enter the film on a downsizing day, … [Read more...]
The Big Year is the sort of vehicle that will cause critics and audiences alike equal difficulty in discerning why and how it ever got made in the first place (which is not necessarily a bad thing). An indie film in all but budget, stars, and well... 20th Century Fox, it's a slow, meandering "comedy" that isn't exactly funny, and doesn't offer much insight when it comes to what it thinks you ought … [Read more...]
If the Houser Brothers of Rockstar Games, the creative team behind the famous (or infamous depending on how prude you are) Grand Theft Auto series, relented and allowed a film version of the GTA series to be produced, and if they somehow maintained enough control over the project to inject some artistic fortitude into it and make it more than yet another Hollywood cash-in on a popular video game … [Read more...]
Thanks to services such as those offered by direct TV and Netflix, people are enjoying new movies at home almost immediately after the movies leave the theaters. While in the past we all had to wait for sometimes as many as six months to enjoy home viewing after a movie left the theaters, it is becoming increasingly easy to simulate a theater experience in the living room. With this in mind, this … [Read more...]
For the germophobes and OCD among us, it's a nightmare scenario. A super-strain of some mutated virus turns lethal, making those microscopic organisms constantly surrounding us more than a mere wintertime annoyance that gives you a sore throat and a stuffy nose. Suddenly, the most mundane everyday objects have been transformed into conduits of death. The metallic shopping cart handle at the local … [Read more...]
The Help is one of those films that rolls out every so often with the idea of reaffirming a generalized point of view that no one can possibly deny having anyway... now, in any sufficiently large public forum. It's the 1960s, we're in Jackson, Mississippi, and there is some technical sense in which people of color are no longer slaves. The film lays out the conflicting attitudes of white … [Read more...]
There's a line from the Who's "Join Together" that goes, "It's the singer not the song, that makes the music move along". The first time I heard this lyric I could not get it out of my head, mainly because I disagreed with it so vehemently. For me and my puritanical view of music at the time, if you really loved music, you understood music was about melody, rhythm, dynamics, and the interaction … [Read more...]
The romantic-comedy genre takes a beating like nothing else, with the possible exception of horror, but we all know that it's a genre that not only must exist, but must churn out titles at an incredible rate. There simply has to be a date option at the theater. So far gone is the genre in the collective psyche, that when something comes along that we find ourselves loving - let's say When … [Read more...]
Pointing out that Cowboys & Aliens is not "really" a western may seem odd, and certainly unnecessary. It takes place in 1875, has people riding horses, and contains "Cowboys" in the title, but it also has spaceships, laser guns, and "Aliens" in the title. Thus, I'm not going to point it out, because it's painfully obvious to everyone, even those who have only heard the name, I'm just going to … [Read more...]
