As evidenced by the continuing popularity from the histories of Suetonius on down to the modern tabloid, bad behavior among the rich, famous, and/or powerful is a source of endless fascination for the rest of us. That being the case, there is a built-in magnet for THE DEVILS DOUBLE, based on the life of Iraqi… Read More »
BELLFLOWER
In the French language there is a particularly evocative suffix, -atre. There is no equivalent in English, but applied to a color, yellow, for instance, it bespeaks the sickly quality of that color. And it is that sickly yellow that permeates BELLFLOWER, a crushingly dull look at the lives of crushingly dull people, two of… Read More »
ONE DAY
ONE DAY is an unconventional love story told in an unconventional style. The conceit of dropping in on them once a year on St. Swithins Day (July 15) to check their rocky progression from the 1980s through to the 21st century is as arch and penetrating as it is effective in stripping the story of… Read More »
CONAN THE BARBARIAN
CONAN THE BARBARIAN, being the apotheosis of pulp, means that any nuance or subtlety involved in bringing it to the screen would be an insult to the genre. For all the failings of this dull rendering of Robert E. Howards mythos, it is not a small undertaking. The sets are monumental, the acting broad, forging… Read More »
CIRCUMSTANCE
CIRCUMSTANCE begins in a perfect world before being brought back to the reality with a thud. The perfect world involves the freedom of living an authentic life. The real world, modern day Iran, is a place where lies are the common currency of life, and to behave otherwise is to risk everything, even ones life.… Read More »
DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK
There are many deeply creepy moments in DONT BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, a re-imaging of a 1973 television movie of the same name. There are also many terrifying interludes, but the image that may be the most unsettling is that of a doll that has had its teeth gnawed away. Innocence and violence in… Read More »
I DON’T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT
Chick-flicks, like the chick-lit on which some of them are based, are like comfort food. Not necessarily good from a nutritional standpoint, but soothing, predictable, and offering nothing challenging. The plot arcs will follow the accepted formula: cutesy and funny, before moving on to the inevitable conflicts, think of it as the crunchy topping on… Read More »
LITTLEROCK
The serendipity at work in LITTLEROCK is of a profoundly subtle nature. And like the title itself, which refers to a dusty backwash in California rather than the capital of Arkansas, things are never quite what they seem. Expectations are subverted, assumptions exploded, and the meaningless nature of words is replaced by the importance of… Read More »
CONTAGION
Steven Soderbergh begins CONTAGION with a black screen, the sound of a cough, and, when the picture comes up on screen, the caption Day 2 in appropriately lurid red letters. The cough belongs to Gwyneth Paltrow, one of the legion of stars that shuffle through this sprawling tale of social devolution, and in a nicely… Read More »
3
3 is a German variation on the classic French bedroom farce. As such, in addition to the leaping from metaphorical bed to metaphorical bed with all the attendant cross-purposes and miscommunications, there are also robust and tantalizing morsels of semiotics, synchronicity, existential identity, with a romantic spirit at work that not only invokes, but also… Read More »
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