I enjoyed writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits well enough at first. Yet as my chronological distance from the project increases, so too do my annoyances with its gender power dynamics. The film follows six very specific Brooklynites whose lives are vaguely intertwined and then thrown into further disarray when a young, beautiful Australian disrupts…
Life is all about taking risks. The decisions we make, no matter how big or how small they may seem, determines different outcomes we can’t always predict. Some of those moments will cause us to jump for joy in victory, while other moments will bring us to our knees in defeat. It shouldn’t surprise us…
If there is a mindset that is getting on my nerves more and more as it becomes steadily more prominent, it’s the idea that a work (especially a film) possessing a certain level of either style or ostentatiousness is in and of itself worthy of praise. It’s an ideology that gave the laughably atrocious 2002…
Zombie movies are always shot from the point of view of the last few and scared survivors. They are outnumbered, running out of ammo, their friends are bitten one by one, and the zombies just keep on coming after their brains. What about a zombie story from the zombie’s point of view? They experience the…
Damsels in Distress is perhaps the most pretentious screenplay ever filmed. I imagine there was a more comprehensible first draft and then writer/director Whit Stillman (“The Last Days of Disco”) pulled the thesaurus off the shelf and went to work. These damsels come across more as ridiculous caricatures than actual flesh and blood characters; nobody…
At fortysomething, Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) is living the American Dream. He has a nice house, a decent job, two loveable kids, and unlike most people, he’s married to his high school sweetheart, Emily (Julianne Moore). But that white picket fence is only as strong as those who built it, and in Weaver’s case, this…
“Hitch” meets “The 40 Year Old Virgin” with a mix of family values? Judging from the trailer of Crazy, Stupid, Love. that may be an apt description. In it, bland and fortyish Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) finds himself recently divorced from his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) (she cheated on him) and sticking out like a…
