Elegant, worldly and perhaps the consummate summation of the French male ideal, singer/songwriter/post-modern rake Serge Gainsbourg’s music was as much a last gasp of the cabaret era as it was a life giving breath to the idea of “pop” music as grandiose, surreal storytelling. Admittedly his elegance was more Keith Richards, gutter cosmopolitan than court [...]
Read MoreI have, on more than one occasion, put forth the idea that George Clooney is the new Cary Grant. He’s cool, affable, and you don’t get creeped out if you see him with a woman half his age. The problem with my theory is the acting.
Read MoreThe Prince and the Showgirl has never existed on DVD, and The Video Station has been hanging on to its VHS copy for many years now, although it never rented much – the result of a very lukewarm reputation. My Week With Marilyn is the story of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, [...]
Read MoreIn a music magazine… sometime ago… a paraphrased quote… Nostalgia is for someone who’s stopped dreaming. But if we dream of our past, it’s still dreaming, isn’t it? Time has only marinated these memories so they can gestate and reform. We can start again with the rich loam of our history… we can… wait, that’s [...]
Read MoreWhat will we do? If it happens? The end of the world? Close our eyes then open them quickly because if we can’t see catastrophe then it can’t see us, so it sidles by? Decamp to a personal, illusory safe haven? Take cold comfort in I-told-you-so’s to whoever is left? We know we’ll pull out [...]
Read MoreLike Crazy was a very, very good movie, but not a romantic comedy, as the box might lead you to think. It’s more of a drama that chronicles the relationship between Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones), two young college students, he an American, and she a Brit, studying in Los Angeles. They fall [...]
Read MoreMartin Scorsese hasn’t heretofore been famous for making family-friendly movies with positive life-affirming messages, but there was never any reason to think he couldn’t do it well if the subject suited his tastes. I can’t think of a fairy tale that could dovetail with Scorsese’s passions much more closely than Hugo, an atmospheric kid-flick that [...]
Read MoreThe Way stars Martin Sheen as an eye doctor who goes to France after his son (the film’s director and one of Martin’s real life sons, Emilio Estevez) dies in an accident at the beginning of a pilgrimage. Once there, he decides the best way to honor Emilio is to do the pilgrimage himself, taking [...]
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 [...]
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