The eighties are alive in 2012, or at least, the memory of the eighties is. If you’re not up for a comedic imagining of police officers infiltrating inner city schools, check out Jason Segal’s latest or Adrien Brody’s turn as a widget educator, momentarily changing lives in an interchangeable occupation. If you’re up for an adventure, or […]
If nothing else, Hugo is a departure from the characteristic Martin Scorsese film. George Melies (Ben Kingsley) is not whacked by a bullet in the back of the head. The Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) does not pass out from smoking too much pot and forget to get rid of the getaway truck. No one is insulted […]
This week, Disney launches another tentpole film, Elizabeth Olsen gives audiences eighty-eight minutes of tension, a couple of white folks put salmon in an unusual place, a couple of professors exchange identities, and Eddie Murphy tries his hand with teenagers in his most recent, not-funny role. John Carter: Andrew Stanton, director of Wall-E and Finding Nemo, makes […]
Undefeated chronicles the 2009 season of the Manassas Tigers, a high school football team in North Memphis – also known as the perennial whipping boys for the rest of the state. Facing a fourteen-year losing streak, the team is taken over Bill Courtney, a volunteer head coach / lumber salesman in his quest to lead them to […]
Mar07
Welcome to Nowhere (Bullet Hole Road) — A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Road Movie
Characteristically, the road movie is a catharsis played out on the big screen. Mounting frustrations of quotidian, pedestrian existences crescendo into a need to break away from all that is familiar. At the same time, the road movie is a contradiction as characters escape the familiar by utilizing the uber-familiar and search for the unknown by means […]
Beginning in 2008, frugality became the new luxury. The bling that was in a few years prior became excessive and the winnowing of credit card debt became the fashion of the moment. People began going green less out of compassion for the environment, and more of a means to limit their electric and gas bills. As we […]
In a number of portrayals of women passing as men, gender-bending is a method of establishing an identity. In Albert Nobbs, the diminutive, soft-spoken, ginger-haired Irish hotel butler (Glenn Close) becomes a man, in part to escape the brutality of men in a previous relationship, but more for anonymity. Albert makes few social statements through her disguise; rather, […]
It’s believed that thousands of people live below the streets of New York City, inhabiting the shoulders and gullies of the labyrinthine subway. Those pounding the pavement to and from work each day may wonder what impels these denizens to navigate dark, dirty tunnels in lieu of facing the myriad bodies and bills that await them above. […]
Image via Khodorkovsky-movie.com No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being a genius(*). So when he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” he couldn’t have known what he was asking his Soviet counterpart let loose. Four years after Reagan’s speech, the detritus of Communism littered the path to a post-Soviet Russia. The decade that followed […]
Real-life Navy SEALs, Tyler Perry pretending to be profound, but really just taking your money, the President’s daughter in a space prison, the enigma that is Amanda Seyfried persists, and the conundrum of seeing a Jennifer Aniston movie. Welcome to the weekend! Act of Valor: If nothing else, this film could be a surprise study in realism. […]