In the name of boredom, clickbait and trying to remember that life isn’t always as awful as 2017 would suggest, various outlets have been recently compiling “Best Films of the Millennium” lists. Well, as luck and the inevitable slouching towards entropy that we call “time” would have it, I’ve just crossed over 15 years reviewing […]
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Lean, Mean Empathy Machine
Smarter, better people than me have written about Moonlight, writer/director Barry Jenkins’ megaton bomb of artistic triumph. Honestly, I almost didn’t write this at all, seeing no need to add yet another voice of praise to what is already a fairly deafening chorus. Then I remembered what Roger Ebert, the patron saint of modern pop […]
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Fun With Catholics and Communism
The funniest scene in Hail, Caesar! is a microcosm of the film’s overall genius. Foppish British director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) tries to get Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a singin’ and dancin’ cowboy movie star, to deliver a single line of dialogue in a refined, “rueful” way. They repeat the line back and forth to […]
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United in Praise
At the end of the first Iron Man, when Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) popped up to mention “The Avengers Initiative,” it launched what can only be described as the most massive collective nerdgasm in this or any quantum parallel reality. Since then, there have been minor nerdquake aftershocks (seeing the team together for the […]
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Movie Politics Hurt Less
Years from now, we will tell our children about surviving the 2016 presidential election in much the same way our older relatives described enduring the Great Depression, Vietnam or dial-up Internet speeds. This cultural car crash, this feces-flinging sideshow, has exposed the very worst parts of America, from our media’s inability to actually do their […]
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Run! It’s Super-ISIS!
Donald Trump. His name isn’t mentioned, but his presence is felt throughout London Has Fallen, an action film about the cartoonish nightmare scenario keeping Trump supporters awake at night. A sequel to 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen, the president is under siege…again…after an omnipresent terrorist group, capable of executing a massive attack anywhere at any moment, […]
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Ending in the Middle Earth
There are many things I don’t understand: quantum mechanics, car commercials, who put the bomp in the bomb bah bomp bah bomp. But chief among the perplexing unsolvables to me remains how people who loved writer/director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy don’t like the current Hobbit series. Better acted, more personal and possessed […]
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Check Out These Tiny Packages!
Just as the short story trembles in the footprint of the novel, the short film plays David to feature-length film Goliaths. But with the help of shiny, naked bald men, these wee bits of cinematic splendor step from the shadows and sling their short shots. And in the 12 years I’ve had the pleasure of […]
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All the President’s Meh
Although he may still be a panty dropper to the baby boomer set, Robert Redford looks like he needs a good nap. The bags under his eyes are scene-stealing uncredited supporting actors in The Company You Keep, a 70s-style thriller about investigative journalism that is neither thrilling nor investigatory. It can’t even sustain the indignation […]
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In Defense of ‘The Newsroom’
Maybe it was the Funny or Die video. Or the article on Newsbusters. Or the constant stream of attacks on Twitter. Who knows? But at some point today, it became impossible for me not to write about “The Newsroom,” the best show that smart people treat like crap. I am going to attempt to be […]
