Gillian Armstrong knew little if anything about George Orry-Kelly when she started making her zesty and intimate documentary about him, WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSED. The Australian with enormous talent and even more guts, hopped a boat to New York City when he was 24, where he met and fell in love with Archie Leach, and became… Read More »
THE BETTER ANGELS
No plaster saint, nor marble effigy of Abraham Lincoln is to be found in THE BETTER ANGELS. Based on the recollections of Lincoln’s surviving family, as spoken by his cousin about his boyhood in Indiana, this is a Lincoln before the legends had taken root, the Lincoln of great promise whose intellectual curiosity and love… Read More »
Jon Stewart and Maziar Bahari – Rosewater
As God is my witness, I thought that Jon Stewart knew that Aryan had more than one definition. He didn’t, but it made for a lively way to start my conversation with both him and Maziar Bahari on October 22, 2014. As Bahari pointed out, Iranians are the original Aryans, and he went on to… Read More »
Jon Favreau is CHEF
Jon Favreau is very serious about CHEF. Its his baby, after all. He wrote, directed, and co-starred in this lovely fable about a chef who has to have the rug pulled out from under him to find out what it means to be successful. Hence his willingness to sit down for an interview at 6:45… Read More »
Theodore Bikel Walks IN THE SHOES OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM
Where to begin when talking to the wonder that is Theodore Bikel? In his 90 years (and counting), hes been arrested protesting the treatment of Soviet Jewery, and protesting for civil rights in the American south. He originated the role of Captain Von Trapp on Broadway, recorded the best-selling Yiddish folk albums of all time,… Read More »
Richard Linklater — BOYHOOD
Richard Linklater’s films cant be easily pigeon-holed, and that’s because he surrenders to the driving force of an artistic compulsion, or as he put is when I spoke to him on July 17, 2014, a crazy idea. His latest film, BOYHOOD, is an example of an idea so crazy that it’s beyond brilliant. It’s inspired.… Read More »
NOAH
In the old days, biblical epics were produced as much to have an excuse for prurient excess as for the moral lesson to be imparted by the retelling of a familiar tale of good and evil. Darren Aronofsky’s NOAH is about as far from that trope as it is possible to get and still be… Read More »
MALEFICENT
There is an old saw about movies that goes, “Dont tell, show” and, alas, MALEFICENT has gotten that backwards. wtih an incessant, distracting, and otherwise unhelpful narration. Its an unfortunate irony in that the film seeks to inform us of the other side of the Sleeping Beauty story, that of the evil fairy who cursed a… Read More »
DELIVER US FROM EVIL
DELIVER US FROM EVIL is a curious blend of intensity and lassitude. Though rife with images of gory mutilations, animal and human, there is in its decorous pacing the whiff of the better Merchant-Ivory productions of times gone by, where things unfold in their own time and without any unseemly rush amid lush surroundings and… Read More »
SEX TAPE
The protagonists of SEX TAPE are a happily married couple, deeply in love and deeply committed to one another and their two kids, but, after 10 years or so of marriage, the fiery passion they enjoyed in the first flush of lust/love, and before discovering how versatile a ladys lady parts are, has become a… Read More »