"The Polar Express" certainly starts out with a great deal of ambition while trying to make sure it presses all the right notes required of a Christmas movie. There's a calm, mystical score by Alan Silvesti, the usual composer of director Robert Zemeckis, and quite impressive visual effects. There's a poem (as all stories about Christmas must have) of a young boy who is starting to lose faith in Santa....
Thursday, December 25, 2014
Friday, December 12, 2014
The Theory of Everything
"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer time."
-W.H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"
In the beginning, the camera immediately shifts from Hawking in a wheelchair to Hawking on a bike. He is a "strange" and "clever" fellow, with crooked glasses and in an intense quest to solve equations and get the girl. These early scenes feature Eddie Reddmayne being calmly lectured and encouraged...
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Gone Girl
An Irish prince leaves his perfect wife at their perfect home. How perfect is his life? So much that on the night he fell in love with his wife, there was a storm of sugar surrounding them. There aren't many cinematographers better than Jeff Bronenweth, and his camera makes that scene, in particular, hauntingly beautiful. His excellent cinematography lights a dark, dark world, as is often the case...
Monday, November 17, 2014
Frances Ha
Upon first glance, it would seem that these two young ladies are happily in love. They are Frances (Greta Gerwig) and Sophie (Mickey Sumner), running around and playing in the New York jungle featured so beautifully in black and white, in Noah Baumbach's "Frances Ha." It might take a while, but it becomes more evident that they are not a couple, but instead two young women in love with each other...
Friday, October 31, 2014
The Blair Witch Project
It's not quite reality. In one of the
weaker scenes of “The Blair Witch Project,” the somewhat
groundbreaking mockumentary horror film of 1999, a character teases
his fellow documentarian about her never-ending use of the camera. He
now understands why she's in love with it, why she continues to film
even though some very strange and eerie things have been happening to
them on their trek into haunted...
Monday, September 22, 2014
Enemy
Chaos. So begins "Enemy," a film even darker than the previous movie Jake Gyllenhaal and director Denis Villeneuve did, last year's "Prisoners." (Perhaps there's some sort of Von Triers-like melancholy trilogy in the making.) There are genuinely few films quite like "Enemy," so bizarre, so rich, so likely to inspire nausea. It's not a perfect film--at times it becomes a bit full of itself, with upside...
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Robin Williams
Thomas Brown once noted that death is the cure for all illnesses. This is a morbid way to start a tribute for one of our national treasures, Robin Williams, who died yesterday of an apparent suicide. But let me explain. In "What Dreams May Come," one of his most underrated films, Williams plays a grieving...
Noah
In his exhaustive anthology of the history of violence called "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker starts with the Bible, which "depicts a world that, seen through our modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery." He cites Matthew White, who estimates that through 600 passages that discuss...
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Guardians of the Galaxy
I don't think I ever anticipated nodding my head along to "I Want You Back" while watching a Marvel Comics film set in space. But there I was, doing such a thing. In what is one of the most joyous scenes in the film, the audience seemed to be filled with happiness as...well, it's best left unexplained for now. Just watch it, and I hope you will smile.
The movie opens with the unearthly "I'm Not in...
Monday, August 4, 2014
Boyhood
The joys of a young child can be ruined by the yelling of adults. This is how "Boyhood" starts. There's a young child (Ellar Coltrane) lying in the grass, unobtrusively staring at the sky. His mother (Patricia Arquette) picks him up and asks him how his day was, gently prodding him about negative progress reports she's receiving from his teacher. His mother mentions that the teacher claims Mason,...
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Et tu, Koba?
"Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" is the movie that has brought "Apes" to war. Oddly enough, this is one of the most anti-war films in years, with unmistakable allegories and warnings against unguarded militantism and vengeance. This has been observed by several others. Ari Siletz notes that audiences will surrender to the film's fatalism, that "when the forecast is war, peacemaking is...
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Life Itself
I've made no secret of my admiration of Roger Ebert over the years. But allow me to keep on showing my adoration for the finest film critic we ever had: If there ever was an American treasure in film criticism, it was Ebert. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of a Hollywood Walk of Fame...
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
The Fault in Our Stars
"I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death."
-Anne Frank
The only thing worse than cancer is kids with cancer. This is a fairly bold topic for a novel and film about young people in love to tackle. But tackle it does. This isn't a movie about sick kids but kids who are sick, and there...
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Edge of Tomorrow
Did you see the science fiction movie where the guy needs to solve a mystery and yet he keeps dying? But every time he dies, he suddenly wakes up again--you've seen it right? It's a neat little film with a clever concept: what if a movie was like a video game, where every time the character died, he got to try over again and win? The film is called "Edge of Tomorrow," and it's the hit new...
Sunday, June 29, 2014
The Legacy of Barack Obama (Pssst--He's Not the Worst!)
By now you've probably heard about the poll that says Obama is the worst president since the end of World War II. We've still got several years to go, but it seems voters have made up their minds about the man who was to bring us hope, change, and a post-racial America.
The worst president ever?...
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