You cant fault people for wanting to take a trip to French Polynesia on someone elses dime. The water is so very blue, the sunsets are so very spectacular, the palms swaying the trade winds are so very alluring. And yet, as Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn sat down to write the screenplay set there,… Read More »
CRUDE
Click here to listen to the interview with Joe Berlinger (17:47).The best moment in Joe Berlingers documentary CRUDE is when a slick Florida lawyer, attempting to make Chevrons case that it isnt responsible for the environmental catastrophe in the Ecuadorian Amazon mis-speaks. Eduardo Reis Veiga is going over, point-by-point, how Chevron cleaned up the jungle.… Read More »
LAW ABIDING CITIZEN
LAW ABIDING CITIZEN is a competently made thriller that attempts to make up in panache what it lacks in credibility. It fails. Taking a distinctly right-wing point of view when considering the not inconsiderable problems with the American justice system, it shamelessly pushes all the right emotional buttons as it tells the tall tale of the… Read More »
WHIP IT
What WHIP IT nails as well as anything ever committed to film is that heady, giddy moment in a girl’s life when she is sure that she has all the answers and that her parents are idiots. In other words, it’s that moment when the prospect of absolute freedom, unencumbered by responsibility, first makes its… Read More »
SURROGATES
Ever since 18th century philosopher/ mathematician Rene Descartes first dreamed up the image of the ghost in the machine to explain the relationship of mind to body, the image has held potent sway with popular imagination. The concept itself, where the body ends and the person begins, is a question that many philosophers have addressed,… Read More »
AMELIA
Of late, Hilary Swank gives only two kinds of performances, award-winning, and duds. AMELIA, a prestige effort from Mira Nair, alas, delivers the latter. To be fair, she and everyone else concerned are not working from a script, but rather from a scenario thrown together with broad strokes and characters conceived as cardboard cut-outs of… Read More »
THE PROPOSAL
What almost saves THE PROPOSAL from itself is a pair of performances by Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds that have a bold and bracing bite of snarkiness to them. Alas, the formulaic nature of the script requires that they both warm up to each other and in the process, while their characters find true love,… Read More »
JENNIFER’S BODY
Though rife with occult phenomenon, JENNIFERS BODY is more in the tradition of HEATHERS than BUFFY. This sophomore effort by Diablo Cody explores the intense, baffling, and all-consuming relationships that bind and repel adolescent females to and from one another. Framing it in the context of a horror film overflowing with blood, erotica, humor, and… Read More »
MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, THE
Two men, each determined to cross the border from Kuwait into Iraq for reasons they find compelling to themselves, wait with some impatience to get going. One is a man whose consciousness has been expanded beyond the quotidienne, and the other, a man whose consciousness has been contracted to the confines of his own psyche… Read More »
CHRISTMAS CAROL, A
A great deal of money has been expended in order to bring the Robert Zemeckis 3D animated version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL to the screen. And yet, for all the showy set pieces that have Scrooge (Jim Carrey) hurtling through the stratosphere at breakneck speeds creating dizzying tableaux of impressively changing perspectives, every woman in… Read More »
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