James Vanderbilt’s TRUTH is a careful, disturbing dissection of the triumph of style over substance, flash over facts, insinuated itself, and then took over, television news. Based on the book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, it examines that moment in history when the eponymous truth… Read More »
LEGION
LEGION is an incoherent flick positing, amid all the apocalyptic mayhem, that the Almighty is out of touch with His/Her inner Deity. It may be a juicy mystery that passeth all understanding to make theologians quiver with the delight of unraveling it, but as a premise for a movie, it’s incoherent. That it also attempts… Read More »
WORDS, THE
THE WORDS is under the impression that is making a profound artistic statement about the creative impulse. Its not. Though handsomely mounted, as they say, with a gifted cast gracing the screen, the film is diffuse, unfocused, and worst of all, dull, even when indulging in melodrama of the most fulsome variety. Using the slick… Read More »
THE ALAMO
Its sad to think that people gave up their lifes blood defending and attacking The Alamo. The loss of human life is always a tragedy. Adding to that very real tragedy is that the film version commemorating that event is such a stinker.Now, any retelling of what happened way back in 1836 in San Antonio… Read More »
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW understands that its premise, a cataclysmic climate change that happens in less than a week, is hard for even the most sympathetic audience to swallow. It thoughtfully has its characters mentioning that its all very odd and to be suitably surprised by it all. Given that expositional permission, the audience is… Read More »
AMERICAN DREAMZ
Click here to listen to the interview with Paul Weitz (8:06).The carefully orchestrated public persona of politics and the carefully orchestrated “reality” of reality television come in for a timely comparison in Paul Weitz’s AMERICAN DREAMZ. Nothing and no one is off limits in this barely veiled shot at pop culture, world politics, and the allure… Read More »
AMERICAN DREAMZ — DVD
Click here to listen to the interview with Paul Weitz (8:04)Click here to listen to the interview with Paul and Chris Weitz for ABOUT A BOY (20:36)AMERICAN DREAMZ did not perform as well as it should have when it was released. Perhaps it cut too close to the bone as it turned reality television inside… Read More »
VANTAGE POINT
VANTAGE POINT takes a storyline that is a middling throwback to the Cold War paranoid fantasies of a half-century ago and tries to jazz it up with a multi-view narrative. The device makes the most of doing the requisite slow reveal of exactly what happened before, during, and after a terrorist attack in Spain, but… Read More »
AT ANY PRICE
The genius of Ramin Bahrani’s AT ANY PRICE is the way it talks about things without actually talking about them. This is a story of cause-and-effect, with the failings of a father reflecting the corruption of the American Dream. Though it takes place in the heartland, on that most homespun and wholesome of enterprises, the… Read More »