He wore a stovepipe hat, had an awesome beard, ended slavery and was ultimately assassinated. Can you think of a better way to make the 16th President of the United States any cooler? Well I suppose hunting vampires in between his ratifying the laws of the land would make him more awesome. This fantastical alternate…
Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is uncharitable, misogynistic, nihilistic, a racist, a chain-smoker, a raging alcoholic, and a bad father, but Rampart, the movie he’s thrust into, is astonishingly dull. Helmed by Oren Moverman, it explores the state of the LAPD circa the late ’90s but, despite what its title suggests, the film isn’t about the…
Daniel Espinosa’s Safe House is a lesson in “Filmmaking with Parkinson’s.” The choppily edited actions sequences — onslaughts of bright colors and enough “shaky-camera” to make Jason Bourne nauseous — are hard to endure. Moreover, they’re built on clichés: Coincidental protests (allowing the protagonists some cover), accidental assassinations, and a handful of close calls. Because…
Alice is an unflattering name for a woman. It’s not, however, nearly as bad as Claire is. For me, Claire conjures up an image of a sad, homely girl whiling away the hours, in a rocker, crocheting a sweater. It is, therefore, a fitting name then for the boy-haircut having, wearing the same dull clothes…
When men dress up as women in the movies, it is almost always in a comedy or farce; think “Some Like It Hot,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and “Tootsie.” However, when the situation is reversed and the film concerns women dressing up as men, the movie is habitually a drama bordering on tragedy: “Yentl,”…
It took two viewings for me to appreciate We Need to Talk About Kevin, the neo-surrealist drama helmed by Lynne Ramsay. Based on a book of the same name, the film, scribed by the director alongside Rory Kinnear, explores the theme of “nature versus nurture” through the eyes of Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), a disenchanted…
There are several factoids I learned after watching The Wicker Tree, the 39 years in the making sequel to cult favorite “The Wicker Man.” For one, nuclear power plants make all men who drink or bathe in its cooling source sterile (although on the flip side it also grants them the gift of being able…
