Biopics are a bit of a conundrum, aren’t they? On one hand, they seem like ideal fodder for movie adaptations since the subject of the film will likely carry a guaranteed audience, especially when popular musicians and bands are the focal point. But on the other hand, how can one film possibly be adequately succinct…
It is not uncommon to experience a false sense of enlightenment when confined or placed into a stressful setting. You don’t always necessarily understand your surroundings or know how you arrived there, but you will, nonetheless, attempt to find meaning in the situation and overcome. Eugenio Mira’s Grand Piano tries for such an effect. The…
While I am not crazy about a director including his own name in the title of a film (after all, we never saw a movie called “Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane” or “David Lean’s Great Expectations” or “Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver”), I can sort of forgive Lee Daniels (who directed the equally obscurely titled “Precious: Based…
Vanessa Hudgens is growing up nicely. In the supposedly based on a real events movie, The Frozen Ground, she portrays a stripper who survives a murder attempt by a serial killer. Nicolas Cage is the Alaskan police detective trying like hell to stop him before he strikes again. The trailer for this psychological thriller (which…
There are some good things to say about the newest film by director James McTeigue (“Ninja Assassin,” “V For Vendetta“), a combination of “Sleepy Hollow,” “Saw,” “Se7en” and the latter-day Sherlock Holmes films. First, it acquaints the uninitiated with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s most creative and tortured writers (Poe, while…
Creepy describes the situation Edgar Allan Poe finds himself in. In the dark thriller The Raven, it seems a serial killer has taken to Poe’s writing and is using it as a template to spectacularly kill people (think “The Pit and the Pendulum”). Poe, enlisted by Baltimore detectives, puts his macabre mind to work to…
I was first introduced to the “Theatre of the Absurd” in a high school philosophy class. This sect of plays which were mostly written by European playwrights in the mid-1900s was considered a declaration against realism and the concept of how to make a “great” play. Never have I imagined returning to a so-called “Theatre…
