Midway through The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, in the midst of a breakdown (breakthrough?), surrounded by his typewriter and empty bottles and strewn about pages, signifiers of talent devolving into madness, the successful yet troubled novelist at its center self-consciously admits to having recently written only “first lines and first pages. No middle. No end.”…
“Is an intelligent being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?” — Philip Roth, The Counterlife With Indignation, James Schamus makes his directorial debut from his own adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 book of the same name. Schamus is most well known as the screenwriting and producing partner of Ang Lee,…
The story of Fury is harsh, straightforward, swift and breathtaking. And it is remarkable to bear witness to Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt, “World War Z”) leading a Sherman tank crew through the German countryside toward Berlin in spring of 1945. The aesthetic qualities too are remarkably immersive — from the .50 caliber anti-tank fire…
Giant rock creatures? A bevy of clichés? Another awful performance from Emma Watson? So this is what a biblical epic looks like in the new millennium. It’s also what Darren Aronofsky looks like with a big budget. Neither is very encouraging. Well, except for the rock monsters, of course. Aronofsky’s Noah is a non-traditional take…
I wager there are not too many people who would raise their hands to go back in time to high school. College? Yes. But high school, you would have to be out of your mind to go back to the cliques, emotional turmoil, bullies, and hormones, unless you were a football player of course. The…
It’s tough being the new kid at school especially when you have the social skills of a mudskipper. All it takes to make things better is to connect with one person who gets it, though. Finding two is even better. In Summit Entertainment’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie is lucky enough to learn…
Um . . . hmm . . . wow. I’m stupefied at what a colossal mess The Three Musketeers has been made into. Three of the more prominent heroes in history have been watered down to pathetic caricatures and, in their own movie, given a back seat to a nausea inducing 3D experience and to…
