Stop me if you’ve heard this already. Batman, Poe Dameron, and King Arthur walk into a bar. They team-up to stop a vile drug lord and rob him along the way. Rather dynamic, right? Top flight action stars. Type-A leaders with machismo laced on each fiber of beard scruff. Good avenging evil and making a…
Tag: Movies
Velvet Buzzsaw
Nightcrawler was frightening and creepy. In that film, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a rogue videographer who caters his services to network head Renee Russo. Theirs is a relationship of use and abuse, and a partnership of drawing in money and building a rep. Nightcrawler is a film that prompts heavy conversation, or a shower, which makes…
’80s Teen Movies
Life moves pretty fast. Sage advice of a hallowed teen from the mid-1980’s, when Reaganomics’s voodoo charmed ideologies, a generation of kids were being raised at the shopping mall, and Huey told us to get back in time. Hollywood noticed these changes and, like John Bender piercing his ear in triumph, transformed pop-culture into the…
Roma
Forget Alfonso Cuarón’s smooth camera work and his technical attention and his ability to wreak havoc in the background while his foregrounds remain calm and focused. Instead, watch Roma and pay attention to Cuarón the photographer who can bring beauty and life to a million shades of gray. Filmed in a black-and-white palate that is…
ANON: SciFi blast for cliché crime caper
The future can be scary, and that’s exactly how writer/director Andrew Niccol (Gattica) likes it. Niccol’s latest, Anon, directly distributed by Netflix, takes social media privacy scares and concerns and makes those issues a substantial threat as every event every single person sees is stored forever in an Orwell-ian cloud. Anon presents an original, albeit…
The Big Picture
Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal loves movies. He is passionate about the experience of communally watching a film, the unique ability for artists to tell their stories, and the Hollywood business machine behind it all. But man, he hates franchise features. From Marvel and DC to Star Wars and Star Trek to dinosaurs and robots,…
Suspenseful. Alluring. Slow.
Stoker is a surprisingly wonderful indie film written by an American television actor, directed by a Korean known for violent action flicks, all told in a suspenseful vein that Alfred Hitchcock would find suitably satisfactory, especially with the themes presented within: a loner child, daddy issues, an ignorant mother, a suspicious uncle, and death, death,…
A most excellent look at a personage of historical significance
Daniel Day-Lewis steals the show as the title character in Lincoln, but by all rights, the film itself could have been named Amendment XIII as the second act’s energy, as well as most of the third, is focused on the debate in the House to abolish slavery nearly leaving Lincoln as a mere witness to…
The "Fake Picture" becomes a real hit
In the film Argo, producer Lester Siegel, played by Academy Award winner Alan Arkin, puts forth real effort into making a fake film a success as a perfect ruse to rescue six wanted Americans hiding at the Canadian Ambassador’s residence during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. The triple-threat of Ben Affleck (Argo‘s Producer-Director-Star) must have…
