In Chronicle we get one of the year’s best films, a fun and cool and awesome piece of lower-budget sci-fi that uses the found footage format, a simple but neat premise and seamless special effects to deftly detail in larger-than-life fashion what I imagine are the horrors of being a bullied teenager today. Dreamed up [...]
Read More Chronicle, Dane DeHaan, David, drama, Josh Trank, Max Landis, Sci-Fi, thriller
Haywire, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Gina Carano is the story of a private sector security agent who is double crossed and sets forth on a mission of revenge. First question: Who is Gina Carano? Gina is a mixed martial arts fighter and, I’m totally serious, a former “American Gladiator.” While this is not [...]
Read More action, adventure, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Gina Carano, Haywire, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Noah, Steven Soderbergh, thrillerLight the fuse… Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (note the official title uses a dash to avoid the awkwardness of two colons) is, arguably, the best of the four Tom Cruise-led films based on the classic 1966-1973 TV series. This has a lot to do with the hiring of director Brad Bird, who heretofore had [...]
Read MoreI will often get angry about U.S. remakes of foreign films, and it happens quite often, so this may explain my general demeanor. Eat Drink Man Woman becomes Tortilla Soup, Breathless (1960) becomes Breathless (1983), Il Postino becomes The Postman. That last one’s not really a remake, but I like to imagine that they were [...]
Read MoreWhatever history will decide were the merits of the Cold War, and beyond a shared belief in political fear mongering and secret microphones it’s all a bit dubious, it cannot be argued that the prime beneficiaries of nearly 40 years of undercover ‘spy-jinks’ (a word I just invented, and will now trademark in hopes of [...]
Read MoreI’ve always looked forward to every Pedro Almodóvar film, since he is one of the few working directors who is actually enthusiastic about his forbears, and revels in the resultant formalism we see onscreen. To me, Volver was his crowning achievement, and one that I hoped he would build on to reach even greater heights. [...]
Read MoreRubber-faced British funnyman Rowan Atkinson, aka Mr. Bean, reprises his silly spy persona in Johnny English Reborn, a mildly amusing follow-up to the enjoyable 2003 spy spoof that, like its parent, is perfect for those who find the Austin Powers movies too obscene.
Read MoreThere is a problem in Hollywood these days. The ratio of excellent young actresses to actual scripts worthy of their talent is about 40 to 1, and it’s increasing every year. It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that, for actors under 30, the number of talented women far exceeds those of their [...]
Read MoreEvery so often for the past couple of months, I’ve gotten into conversations with customers about the final scene of the excellent indie drama/sci-fi Another Earth. By my count so far I’ve heard at least six or seven good alternative explanations for what we see in the last couple seconds of that film, which of [...]
Read MoreThere has been, over the last few years, a new strain of music called ‘chillwave’, a somewhat robotic (i.e. unemotional) style of electronic music that is based mostly on the twin concepts of evocation and excavation. Derived from latent memories of 1980′s synthesizer pop/disco, the main thrust of chillwave is its feelings of an emotional [...]
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