(image via AceShowbiz.com) Remember when the internet asked people to turn on their video cameras and record the events of a single day of their lives? Well, 80,000 people really did that last summer. And they shipped 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries off to director Kevin MacDonald and editor Joe Walker. Over the last year, they […]
Confusingly, The Change-Up fluctuates between a decently acted film that boarders on endearing, and the dumbest, trope and cliché-ridden film that I’ve seen in a while. Granted, I’ve avoided watching anything Happy Madison-related, but I can’t imagine that they would fall far below the bar set by this most recent film that tackles “the grass is always […]
(image via Woodland Trust) 1995 offered numerous options for the American kid who preferred outrage over sloth. There were corporate scumbags in America to loathe. There were faceless Communist tyrants in China to defeat. There were political prisoners everywhere to be freed. And there were precious resources of an abused planet to save. It was a time […]
While it falls behind Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, Cache, and The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf is certainly worth a look in that it is a phenomenal exercise in lighting as well as a rather novel take on apocalypse-film genre. Characteristically, Haneke shoots this 2003 film with meticulous precision and strands the viewer […]
In an earlier post, I tackled the connection between Steve Rogers’ transformation into Captain America as a government sponsored PED initiative, and while I still stand by that assertion – and the way in which America’s sponsorship of PED use to “escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of Hell theoretically absolves them of blame because it’s for “the […]
Should a 2011 prequel that resembles its 1968 sequel be hailed for paying homage to its predecessor, most notably with a cultishly referential line like “Take your hands off me, you damned dirty ape!” or its melodramatic construction of the head of the ultimately demonized Gensys Corporation, Jacobs (David Oyelowo), who asserts that Will Rodman “only has […]
Take a couple that has been married for twenty five years. Add a dash of midlife crisis until it yields infidelity and divorce. Slather the wife with remorse for the disintegration of the marriage and her choice to sleep with David Lindhagen. Provide a young, philandering mentor to the aging, seemingly asexual protégé ex-husband. At first glance, […]
With the rash of alien-invasion films over the past few years, it’s not surprising that two such films battled it out for the top spot at the box office during the last week of July. What is rather surprising is that those two films were John Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens – a film that marries anachronism to future fears […]
There’s plenty to be said for Gasland, the Oscar-nominated, 2010 documentary from Josh Fox, who grew up and currently lives on the Marcellus Shale, “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas” in Pennsylvania. In fact, his land is so valuable that he was offered 100,000 an acre by a handful of companies seeking the “ocean of natural gas” […]
Thanks to True Hollywood Story and Behind the Music, watching music-centered biopics and documentaries is often akin to watching Titanic in that you are relegated to waiting for the boat to crash into an iceberg of ego and slowly sink as the mates argue over which dinghy to take. The formula for these shows is simple: take two people who meet in […]