Same Old Story
Well, as my friend Ben would say: yup, that movie exists. Surprisingly, you can read this whole article without having seen the film and the ending won’t be spoiled (I don’t give it away, I promise). I’d seen the original five years ago, and so this time around there were no surprises to spoil, though if I’m honest I never really thought the surprise was all that great in the first place. This is not to say that the end is easy to...
Rebooting the Robots
News broke late last week that a companion television series is in the early stages of development as both an accompaniment and lead up to 2015’s Terminator franchise reboot, and I for one couldn’t be more thrilled. I think. Thrilled, right? No, that’s not it; this is a different feeling. Cautiously optimistic? Unsure of how this plot could work? Hungry? Let’s try that again – news broke late last week that a companion TV series...
“What Do We Call It?” “I Don’t Know, Just Add a T to Las and Let’s Go to Lunch”
It doesn’t fare well for a film when the two-minute pre-credits sequence clues you in to every single thing that’s going to happen in the next hour and thirty-eight minutes. Last Vegas opens with four friends at age ten, living in Flatbush, NY, hanging out at a soda shop with a girl their age. There’s the token black friend and the stock Jewish friend, who in this kind of film are obviously not going to be contenders for the girl’s...
Deliver Us from This Movie
As a compulsive Oscar statistician, a (sometimes) film critic for this website, and a film-lover if not quite a cinephile, I’m aware that the films I see are sometimes limited in scope. That is to say, I see the kind of films that someone like me is apt to want to see. I don’t get to venture out of my tunnel vision very often (what am I saying? I get to do it all the time, I just choose not to). That’s why I like when my dad comes to...
Kill the Messenger
Last year’s Hollywood Oscar contenders were marred by a spate of controversy. It seemed like every single high-profile film was taken to task for some politically incorrect issue or another. Lincoln got heat for its historical inaccuracies; Zero Dark Thirty allegedly condoned the use of torture; Argo jingoistically re-wrote the Iranian revolution; Silver Linings Playbook soft-pedaled the issue of mental illness; Django Unchained and...
Nebraska the Beautiful
Alexander Payne is no stranger to dramas that are oddly comedic and comedies that are oddly dramatic. Sideways, About Schmidt, and The Descendants come to mind immediately as examples of his delicate genre smash-ups. These films, by and large, work because they mine their pathos from the everyday situations of adulthood. I knew then, right from the top that his latest film, Nebraska, would likely be up my alley. I caught it over...