Hot Tub Time Machine
The premise of Hot Tub Time Machine is straightforward and dumb as dirt — it’s all right there in the title, give or take the finer details. Three old friends (and a young hanger-on) head to a ski resort to recapture past glories and forget about their mediocre lives. Exactly one shit-load of booze, one … Continue reading
The Oscars Project: Week 4 – West Side Story
For 82 years, the Academy Awards have purported to choose the year’s best film. For the next year, I’ll be watching one best picture winner per week, starting 52 years ago and working up to tonight’s winner. Some of the films are rightly regarded as classics. Others, decidedly less so. But each of them must … Continue reading
Ghost Writer nails the zeitgeist
For the resident of a glass house, Roman Polanski is remarkably unafraid to throw stones. His latest, The Ghost Writer, isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it is one of the most timely political thrillers in recent memory, taking on the war on terror in general and former British prime minister Tony Blair in particular with … Continue reading
The Oscars Project – Week 3: The Apartment
For 82 years, the Academy Awards have purported to choose the year’s best film. For the next year, I’ll be watching one best picture winner per week, starting 52 years ago and working up to tonight’s winner. Some of the films are rightly regarded as classics. Others, decidedly less so. But each of them must … Continue reading
The Oscars Project: Week Two – Ben-Hur
For 82 years, the Academy Awards have purported to choose the year’s best film. For the next year, I’ll be watching one best picture winner per week, starting 52 years ago and working up to tonight’s winner. Some of the films are rightly regarded as classics. Others, decidedly less so. But each of them must … Continue reading
The Oscars Project: Week One – Gigi
For 82 years, the Academy Awards have purported to choose the year’s best film. For the next year, I’ll be watching one best picture winner per week, starting 52 years ago and working up to tonight’s winner. Some of the films are rightly regarded as classics. Others, decidedly less so. But each of them must … Continue reading
Wonderland lacks wonderment
FILM: Alice in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is many things: a journey through a surreal world full of memorable characters, a brilliantly playful introduction to the worlds of logic and mathematics and, with all its hookahs, mushrooms and body-and-mind-expanding potions, a kindred spirit of American counterculture since at least the heyday of … Continue reading
A heroic act of treason: The Most Dangerous Man in America — Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
FILM: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: The trickiest thing about documentaries is separating the story from the filmmaking. The Most Dangerous Man in America has a great subject in Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who leaked 7,000 pages of classified Pentagon documents that outline the history of the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam … Continue reading
There ain’t no life on Shutter Island
FILM: Shutter Island: I won’t be able to talk about this movie without at least mildly spoiling the ending, so if that’s going to be a concern, best to stop right here. But it really shouldn’t be a concern, because… well, because the ending is kind of dumb. And the odds are, if you’ve seen … Continue reading
Televising the revolution
FILM: Burma VJ: In September of 2007, tens of thousands of Burmese citizens, including an estimated 5,000 Buddhist monks, stood up to the nation’s oppressive military regime. It was the country’s most significant protest in almost 20 years, the first major act of resistance since a 1988 student protest that resulted in the army opening … Continue reading
The Consumption 