The Hangover‘s “trilogy” is the cinematic wet dream of guys who wear backward baseball caps and call their friends “brah.” It is lazy and douchebaggy. I scoff at the movies because I am a snobby feminist killjoy, and they make it so easy by being obvious in their contempt of the female audience. (Or maybe […]
Film
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Concerts on the Big Screen
A few choice music movies
In an interview with Roger Ebert replayed after his death, the movie reviewer discussed his other passion: music. In his earlier career, Ebert had been as much a music reviewer as a movie critic, and a screenwriter for the cult classic Valley of the Dolls. He even wrote a never-produced film for the Sex Pistols. […]
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Someone Else’s Problems
To the Wonder: Terrence Malick falls in wuv
Let’s start with math, because if there’s one thing everybody flipping loves, it is math! The amount of time that passed between the release of Terrence Malick’s Badlands and the release of Days of Heaven: five years. Between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line: 20 years. Then seven years until The New World, […]
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Crazier Than Jack
The crackpot
theories of Room 237
The Shining might be the most confounding movie Stanley Kubrick ever made. Ostensibly a horror film, the 1980 movie has its share of problems: It’s overlong, unevenly paced, uncomfortably creepy, and dramatically unsatisfying. It contains an over-the-top performance by a showboating Jack Nicholson, and an unbelievably grating one by a sniveling Shelley Duvall. But, as […]
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Good Grief, Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann’s Technicolor Wank Fest—Now in 3D!
I don’t know if other readers of The Great Gatsby will relate to this, but I tend to almost forget that Gatsby is a novel of the roaring ’20s, full of flappers and fast cars and gin-fueled debauchery. When I think about Fitzgerald’s book, I think about that far-off green light at the end of […]
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Armor Wars
Shane Black’s new movie is great! (and stars Iron Man)
Hollywood's bars are, no doubt, full of them: writers and actors and directors who had their time in the spotlight, only to be pushed aside when someone better, sexier, or more successful showed up. Los Angeles is a fickle town, and, the cliché goes, you’re only as good as your last picture. Which is why […]
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99 Percent Great
We’re Not Broke rich with inspiration
Mid-last decade, An Inconvenient Truth brought a surprising amount of mainstream attention to global warming. Even Al Gore has expressed shock that millions of people would tune into what is essentially a power point presentation about a scientific phenomena. But what is additional groundbreaking about An Inconvenient Truth—the 2006 Oscar winner for Best Documentary—is that […]
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Cinco de Cinema
Mexican Cinema’s Renaissance
By the ’70s, as Hollywood kicked into high gear with commercial blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars, to the south, Mexican cinema was going in another direction. What had been a promising, shining industry, both artistically adventurous and financially solvent, began to sputter. Many of the films produced in Mexico during the ’60s and ’70s […]
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Uncertainty Principle
Upstream Color Is Gonna Melt Your Brain!
PRIMER, the 2004 debut film of writer/director/editor/composer/star Shane Carruth, stands as one of the foremost Great Whatsits of independent cinema. Made for $7,000, it told its time-travel story in a fashion that was somehow both eminently sensible and entrancingly brain-croggling, with a resolution that all but commanded viewers to go home and get busy on […]
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Mostly Pain
Pain & Gain: Michael Bay makes a Coen Bros. movie
SOMEWHERE OUT THERE in an alternate universe, I like to think that the Coen brothers directed Pain & Gain. It’s a premise that seems ideal for them: the true story of a team of lunkheaded Florida bodybuilders who decide to kidnap a wealthy deli owner and hold him hostage until he agrees to sign over […]
