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...]
Spinning a workable yarn out of Hasidic young-adults that become drug traffickers is a more difficult task than you might expect. One of the main roadblocks is simply that I have already explained the entire story to you. Perhaps worse, the "shtick" of the story, that it involves Hasidic Jews, is one that is itself tricky. Anything sufficiently rigid is hard to get audiences to engage with, and if … [Read more...]
Easily in the running for upcoming film I least understand why I'll be watching, Holy Rollers got some good reactions at Sundance. Even better, the trailer, which doesn't quite explain why I'll be watching (except that Jesse Eisenberg is in it), is awfully cool. Not that it isn't immediately apparent just how engrossing the life and times of young, drug-smuggling, Hasidic Jews can be, … [Read more...]
Zombieland is one of those little Hollywood jokes that's going to come at us once in a while. Two guys who never really did anything before and/or a director who never really did anything before, are at a party with a couple of producers and Woody Harrelson. Well, you almost hope that's how it happened anyway, because the alternative is worse. When we're lucky, as is pretty much the case here, the … [Read more...]
