Quick Review: The Fighter

Posted in movies by - Jan 10, 2011
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Shameless Oscarbait – let me count the ways. Suave leading man plays against type as squirrelly crack addict. Ingenue allows herself to be filmed with puffy eyes and a slight muffin-top. “Based on a true story” with footage from the actual subjects of said story thrown in at the end to show you how well Marky Mark and Patrick Bateman “got” them.

Make no mistake, this is a mediocre sports movie classed up beyond its station by a cast of overqualified actors. There are absolutely no surprises here, even if you don’t know the backstory. If you …

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Quick Review: True Grit

Posted in movies by - Dec 29, 2010
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There is a moment in “True Grit” where the 14-year-old heroine correctly deploys the word “depredations”. She does this with cool authority, and narrates the film with the vocabulary and elan of an NPR Cowboy Poet (actually, much better than that guy- I kind of hate him). I have a soft spot for the lost art of heightened language, and I have always loved the Coens’ loving attention to clever and anachronistic dialogue. Hy’s expression of despair that his barren beloved’s “womb was a rocky place, where my seed could find no purchase” in “Raising Arizona” ranks as …

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Quick Review: Tron: Legacy

Posted in movies by - Dec 18, 2010
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I was 12 when I saw “Tron.” That was the year I got my first home computer, a Commodore VIC-20. I was reading sci-fi so ravenously that year that I even finished the eleventy-thousand unforgivable pages of “Battlefield Earth”. I had callouses on my hands from the unforgiving Atari 2600 joystick and I had my initials on a stand-up here and there. I was the right age, with the right interests. I was absolutely and precisely the target market for “Tron”.

Did it ever work on me. I can’t imagine how bored my mother must have been sitting …

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Quick Review: Burlesque

Posted in movies by - Dec 17, 2010
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I know what you wanna hear. You want to know if this movie is one of those rarest of unicorns – a movie so bad that it wraps all the way back around to awesome.

You’re right to wonder that. Certainly, all the elements are there. Standard “We have two weeks to save the club” plot – check. Lead actor chosen for an ability other than acting? It’s right there. Grafted-on but somehow boringly inevitable love story? You don’t even have to ask. Unlistenable music under the bloated production numbers? This movie stars Cher and …

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Mood Music: Summer Breeze covered by the Isley Brothers

Posted in Mood Music by - Dec 15, 2010
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I love cultural collisions. I love when genres get bent, when unlikely artistic couplings produce gorgeous offspring that don’t look like either parent.

For example, “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts is the very model of beige 70s AM Gold, and the Isley Brothers discography is a virtual roadmap of the journey from Gospel to R&B. When you smash them together, you get more than just a soulful rendition of the original. Ernie Isley’s psychedelic rock chops (he was an early mentor of Jimi Hendrix) add some welcome tension to the song, turning it into a bit of an …

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Quick Review: Black Swan

Posted in movies by - Dec 15, 2010
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I saw this movie tonight, and I’m still puzzling out what I think of it.

In one light, the film is an interesting attempt to an old fable (Swan Lake) from an old medium (Ballet) and remix it all sexy for the digital age. For that I give the director great credit. He also does as good a job as I’ve ever seen of walking the audience step by step through a character’s complete psychotic break.

In the light I’m seeing it in right now, however, it’s a pedantic and slow-moving film that takes a very small message and drives it …

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Quick Review: The Tourist

Posted in movies by - Dec 11, 2010
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I imagine the pitch for “The Tourist” this way:

“You take a pretty lady – an Angelina Jolie type, say. She’s on a sexy high-end train from Paris. She meets a pretty guy -a Johnny Depp type, for example. She is mysterious to the point of incomprehensibility. He is a fish out of water. They travel to a pretty city – let’s say Venice. There’s some sort of intrigue – with gangsters and guns and rooftop chases. They lady and the guy fall in love, because they’re so pretty. And then from way left of …

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Quick Review: Skyline

Posted in movies by - Nov 13, 2010
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This is a dumb summer popcorn movie, yet it was released after we set the clocks back. That tells you everything you need to know about the quality of “Skyline.”

It’s kind of a sci-fi cliche gumbo. Giant ships are hovering over all the earth’s major cities. Electro-squids and stomp-bots are roving to and fro, hunting humans and stepping on everything. Generically attractive but mentally defective young people assemble a plucky escape plan, and stumble on the aliens’ weak point. You can see where this is going.

There was clearly a lot of love and attention lavished on the aliens. …

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The Interwebs are Bottomless.

Posted in life after cable by - Oct 31, 2010
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People who know me sometimes comment on the wealth of useless facts I carry around in my head. Sometimes they even go so far as to ask where I find out all the minutiae that spills out of me in nearly every conversation. So here’s an example of how you find out something weird and awesome to annoy people with a la Darington.

It’s 5am and I can’t sleep. As you would expect, that means I’m sitting in front of a computer. I’m listening to iTunes in a pair of dodgy headphones, trying to find slightly obscure songs to …

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Quick Movie Review: The Social Network

Posted in Mood Music by - Oct 22, 2010
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The Social Network has been relentlessly billed as a film about Facebook. The biggest surprise of the film might be that the iconic social networking program is so peripheral to the story.  Facebook lurks in the shadows here – it’s essentially a McGuffin.

There are a lot of reasons why TSN shouldn’t work.  It’s a resolutely uncinematic story where most of the action takes place in a deposition room. It’s a story where no one gets what they want, and no one emerges the wiser for their travails.  Our protagonists may indeed be sadder, but at movie’s end they are no …

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