Two Movies
Red (2010) – Never read the Warren Ellis comic it’s based on, but it probably wasn’t as frothy and fun as this entry in the Happy Hitman genre. Bruce Willis plays the Retired, Extremely Dangerous (GET...
View ArticleToward a Listicle about Movies That Tried and Mostly Failed to Coin Phrases
Hall Pass (2011) – eponymous The Bucket List (2009) – eponymous Pay It Forward (2000) – eponymous She’s Out of My League (2010) – “Moodle”
View Article“It’s Kind of a Funny Story” (2011)
This bottled coming of age story set inside a mental hospital rose and sank without a trace. Marketers were unable to translate the new megastardom of Zach Galifinakis into some buzz of their own. Such...
View ArticleLimitless, Shameless
“Limitless” (2011) – Surprisingly good sci-fi about a man who stumbles upon a drug that allows him to access his entire brain and become nearly superhuman. He recalls everything he’s ever learned or...
View ArticleThe Beaver, Green Lantern
The Beaver (2011, Jodie Foster) “So, Mel Gibson is a depressed toymaker who finds a beaver puppet in a dumpster. He drinks himself unconscious one night, and a TV falls on him while he’s wearing the...
View ArticleThe Movies of 2011
Here’s the list so far. What else do I need to see? 1) Drive 2) Attack the Block 3) The Artist 4) A Dangerous Method 5) The Tree of Life 6) Beginners 7) Cave of Forgotten Dreams 8) Contagion 9) Young...
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“Prometheus” (2012)
I hope H.R. Giger’s home is papered in royalty checks. In 1978, Ridley Scott took a chance on the weirdo Swiss artist who’d designed ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery cover and put him to work creating a...
View ArticleThree Movies
Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2012) An unemployed man in his early thirties (Jason Segal) talks into a recorder about how he just re-watched “Signs,” and it got him thinking again about coincidences. The...
View ArticleThe Movies of 2012
No complaints, but I’ve a bit busy with my fun-as-hell Slate work, and haven’t blogged my not-needed-at-all movie thoughts for a while. I have being watching movies, though! My early ranking on the...
View Article“Spring Breakers” (2013)
I saw this technicolor-vomit stunt flick the way it was meant to be seen: Surrounded by haters. My film critic pal Asawin dragged me and my roommate Ben over to a late night screening, at Georgetown’s...
View Article“Iron Man 3″ and “No” (2013)
Whenever something in America explodes and kills people — which is to say, frequently — a healthy number of my fellow citizens look for the shadow hand of conspiracy. A gunman in a Connecticut...
View ArticleSeveral Movies I Saw On Planes This Month
Oz, The Great and Powerful (Sam Raimi, 2013) What have we done to deserve this? Disney, which owns the rights to most popular fairy tales and all of Marvel Comics and Star Wars and probably the...
View ArticleEthnic Groups Played by Charlton Heston
Anglo-Saxon (Crossed Swords, 1977) Castilian (El Cid, 1961) French (The Three Musketeers, 1973) Italian (The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965) Latino (Touch of Evil, 1958) Mongol (Genghis Khan, 1992)...
View ArticleSome Movies Seen on Planes, and Some Seen While on the Ground
This Is the End (Seth Rogen, 2013) – Years ago I was a regular reader of a British movie magazine called Neon. It was okay, and it didn’t last very long, but it had a stellar monthly parody page, one...
View ArticleAnd Still More Movies
“The Wolverine” (James Mangold, 2013) The giant robot was a dead giveaway. The second trailer for this second (and much improved) offshoot of the X-Men franchise ended with a dramatic shot that...
View ArticleAdditional Movies
The Sapphires (Wayne Blair, 2013) - Your standard “it was the 60s, and racism was bad” story, with two twists. One: The put-upon black people are aborigines. Two: They’re in a girl group put together...
View ArticleStill… More Movies
After Earth (M. Night Shyamalan, 2013) – I watched this on a flight recently, letting the dread wash over me as I thought “well, shit, I guess it moves me closer to the goal of watching every movie...
View ArticleAnother Movie or Two
Lovelace (Rob Epstein/Jeffrey Friedman, 2013) – Leading off a review with extra-textual information is controversial, I know. Fine. In this case, it explains why this movie stretches so far to avoid...
View ArticleAnother Couple of Movies
Olympus Has Fallen (Antoine Fuqua, 2013) There are movies that I watch when settled into a dark theater, ignoring all distractions, feeling my temper rise when someone checks the fucking football...
View Article“American Hustle” and “The To-Do List”
“American Hustle” (David O. Russell, 2013) Let’s count the ways in which this movie could have failed. One: It fictionalizes an insane real-life story, the “AbScam” sting in which FBI agents bribed...
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