IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE is a bracingly original foray into very black humor. Set in the arctic-lite of rural Norway, it is a tale of relentless pursuit, clueless hubris, and the eccentricities that long winters provoke in the population. Writer Kim Fupz Aakeson and director Hans Petter Moland serve up this arch film about fathers and sons… Read More »
EMPIRE
EMPIRE is a nitty, gritty look at life on the mean streets of the wrong part of New York. Its message, crime doesn’t pay, isn’t a new one, but any film that proffers a moral compass is one worth paying attention to. Also worth paying attention to is co-producer John Leguizamo’s performance as Victor Rosa,… Read More »
CRIMINAL
Greed makes the world go around, at least it does in the seedy world of CRIMINAL. This re-make of the Argentinian film, NINE QUEENS, has been re-imagined by writer/director Gregory Jacobs as a quirky daylight noir with a plot that spins on a dime as its twists and turns on its way to proving that it’s… Read More »
THE DEPARTED
With THE DEPARTED, Martin Scorsese has taken a good film, the Hong Kong minor classic INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and remade it into a movie that is as bloated as it is bland. Gone is the dramatic tension of a slick action flick, gone is the suspenseful psychological subtext that pondered the nature of identity, subsumed into… Read More »
Dennis Farina Embraces BIG TROUBLE
Dennis Farina is a class act. He also has a wicked sense of humor, which explains why he is does comedy so well. Before becoming an actor, he served for many years on the Chicago police force, a background that can’t help but keep the glitter of Tinseltown in perspective. I spoke with Farina on his birthday, February 29, 2002. The conversation ranged… Read More »
John Leguizamo’s EMPIRE
Fearless is a good word to describe John Leguizamo. Think of the roles he’s chosen over the years, Toulouse-Lautrec in Baz Lurhman’s MOULIN ROUGE, a tortured loser in Spike Lee’s SUMMER OF SAM, a sassy transvestite in TO WONG FOO and, especially, the one-man shows that he writes as well as performs where he opens himself… Read More »
John C Reilly is No CRIMINAL
John C Reilly has made a career out of playing the everyman, both the good and the bad. With his cherubic face and burly build, he can be cuddly, forlorn, or menacing with equal aplomb, a talent he displays as a con man in CRIMINAL. When we talked on August 25, 2004, it was obvious that he… Read More »
The PROTAGONIST of Jessica Yu
Jessica Yu’s mind works in unconventional ways, hence her documentary, PROTAGONIST, which starts with the works of Euripides and ends up considering human nature in all its dazzling complexity. When I talked with her on November 29, 2007, the conversation took on why puppets are so potent, tracking down an ex-terrorist, and the gender differences… Read More »
IN BRUGES with Martin McDonagh
Martin McDonagh has the same sort of dark, yet whimsical sense of humor with which his film IN BRUGES, is rife. When I talked with him on January 30, 2008, the twisted way in which he examines morality was top of my list of thing I wanted to discuss, as well as the redefinition of… Read More »