Bright Star is what used to be surefire Masterpiece Theater bait. A serious, deliberate and restrained piece of lushly designed period romance and tragedy. A film where moments and vistas swirl around its centerpiece stars, all managed with a steady and deliberate directorial hand. All said in today’s bombastic, spoon-fed world of cinema… that’s some boring crap. And yet, it’s like comparing Bach to Beatles. Where most mainstream films feel like they’ve got a bouncy hook and melody to bring …
Category: Reviews
First, a confession: Open a film with a vast expanse of stars and you’ve instantly grabbed my inner geek by vice grip right where it counts. Put a knobby starship plowing through that expanse of stars to regions unknown and you’ve won my goodwill. Hello, Pandorum. As the most recent big screen addition to the grime-crusted house deep space sci-fi morphed into circa 1979, German director Christian Alvart’s Pandorum manages to kick off in disorienting fashion, nicely setting up unanswered …
Somewhere between the Oscar-winning geneses of 1980’s Fame and its 2009 remake, technology changed fame’s definition. Once the reward for hard work and craft refinement, fame has become the reward for cheaply hawking the three B’s (belly, breasts and butt). Where fame and the title of “celebrity” (IE- an individual worthy of celebration) were once purchased in the currency of dedicated sweat, it’s now easily traded via the narcissistically shallow efforts to amass a legion of social network followers with …
The winds of change sweep into every avenue of our lives without regard to time or place. It can be the passing of a dear friend, a change in ideology religiously or politically, marriage, a new baby, a new job, or something seemingly inconsequential, such as hairstyles, fashion and music. But one thing will never change as long as Father Time keeps tick-tocking away: High school sucks. Some will disagree. They’ll say their four years of high school were nothing …
Unexpectedly pleasant movies are always a nice surprise. After Cloudy With a Chance of Meatball‘s lackluster marketing efforts and a string of mediocre trailers, I’d all but written it off. Oops. Totally unfamiliar with the children’s book of the same name, I went in to Sony Animation’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with an unattached blank slate– a slate quickly loaded with a congenial array of off-center comedy and LOL zing. Who knew? Cloudy barrels forward with a technicolor …
Jennifer’s Body arrives not as simply a tongue-through-cheek horror film aimed at enticing the teen crowd, but also loaded with a hat-trick of questions: 1) Is Diablo Cody (writer of Juno and Showtime’s United States of Tara) a 2-hit wonder? 2) Does Megan Fox have an acting career beyond Transformers? and 3) Is the movie any good? The answer: probably not, kind of and not really. In move-geek circles, a lot’s been made of the fact Oscar Winning screenwriter Diablo …
Director Shane Acker, heretofore unknown, aside from his short animated films, gets a chance to bask in the limelight this week as his best-known and award-winning animated short, 9, hits the big screen revved up and strung from top-to-bottom with big-name Hollywood voice talent. And you know what? It works. From start to finish, 9 is taught, simple, exciting, not to mention lavishly animated with elaborate texture and detail. Better yet, this is all wrapped nicely into an hour and …
Shane Acker, director of 9*, has a problem. While his student film and Oscar-nominated short of the same name is mysterious, unconventional and wondrously imaginative, it’s also very narrow-cast—an avante guard project appealing to Acker’s sensibilities and a niche handful of others who enjoy dark, fantastical settings and Hot Topic shopping sprees. The theatrical release exudes the same vibe: too dark and mature for kids, too bleak and somber for mass audience appeal and too short to build an audience …
There’s no better way to enjoy a movie than to go in with lowered expectations. No matter how quickly a movie starts licking the drain, it will always fare infinitely better than if approached with a soaring expectation. Of course, that’s a terrible way to experience movies, but it may be the reason I’m not ready to light the rhetorical flamethrower and burn the house of All About Steve– with all the principle players in it, to the ground. All …
Better late than never… Tarantino did it. With promises of splattery, wet violence he lured the cap askew, “F”-dude lunk into seeing a layered and character-centric foreign language film. I’m not sure what percentage that mob of lowest common denominators makes up by way of the roughly 4,250,000 people who saw Inglourious Basterds this last weekend, but if the crowd I saw it with was a sample, shaggy energy drink swilling douchebags were at least 60% of it. Which goes …