Film Essays & Critique
(500) Days of Summer
It’s been a while since American audiences have been treated to a realistic look at the rise and descent of young love. In fact, as far as realistic films about young twenty-somethings falling in and out of love go, they’re ...
How to figure the (financial) failure of ‘Funny People’?
A $23.4 million opening weekend for what had been widely billed as the major comedy event of the summer seemed a tepid shrug of a reaction, and certainly not in line with the expectations and media buzz preceding it. But ...
Favorite Performances: Jean Adair and Josephine Hull (Arsenic And Old Lace, 1944)
The great director Frank Capra was well known for his whimsical, bright, and intelligent films. They were often filled with some of the biggest leading men of the time such as Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, but it was for ...
Favorite Performances: Woody Allen (Manhattan, 1979)
Woody Allen is one of the most well-respected writers and directors in the last fifty years of American cinema, but not much is said of his acting. Well, not a lot great things, that is. He’s often criticized for “playing ...
John Hughes (1950-2009)
Possibly the filmmaker who personifies the 1980s more than any other, writer / director John Hughes has died of a heart attack at age 59 (via Variety). Being too young at the time to appreciate the seminal big hits that ...
Favorite Performances: Adam Sandler (Funny People, 2009)
Continuing with stand-out performances from this year, we move along to another Saturday Night Live alumni. For years, Sandler worked on SNL and in several “comedies” as an idiot man-child and quickly became one of the biggest box-office draws in ...
Favorite Performances: John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph (Away We Go, 2009)
When you hear those two names, what do you think of? TV’s “The Office” and “SNL.” Yet, when the these two appeared as the young couple searching for a place to raise their unborn child in Sam Mendes’ Away We ...
NY Mag: Was John Cazale the greatest actor of his generation?
Robert Duvall or Gene Hackman would more likely be my gut response, but Cazale's all-too-brief film career certainly sported the best batting average of his or any period. He did five features: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, ...
Avatar: Can it Possibly Live Up to the Hype?
James Cameron's forthcoming magnum opus Avatar has been a highly guarded secret ever since we first heard of it a whopping 12 1/2 years ago now. It's been speculated over and endlessly rumored, and no amount of digging could ...
Thank Chaos for engaging films. Read more at D.J. Bigalke’s blog It appears that we’re predisposed to be engaged by certain movies over others. This doesn’t mean that we like or enjoy them more, just that they can hold our attention. An article over at National Geographic breaks down the findings. According to James Cutting, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell [...]
CoverBrowser, the Awful VHS Cover Archive I’m not sure what the point of all this is, but it’s awesome. I never realized just how many awful VHS covers existed until just now. No doubt future generations will look back upon this memory of late 1970s through early 2000s box art and barf. In between laughing about the concept of big, huge [...]
Twilight: New Moon soundtrack has unexpectedly awesome music Or perhaps this was a measured attempt to get hipsters to quit bashing the franchise. Ha, good luck to them, though it’s unlikely to happen. This has already been demonstrated by the froth despite the many, many photographs of the stoned age couple out and about, eyelids never above half-mast, and hipster looks they generally [...]
A farewell, for Henry Gibson “A poem, by Henry Gibson.” That’s how audiences first got to know the actor on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, who left us today at 73. He leaves behind an impressive body of work. While he was never a leading man other than in such turns as Nashville (for which his fans insist, quite rightly, that [...]
How to trick out your WordPress install The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog Very helpful guide. Included are initial configurations, must-have plugins (I learned a lot from the foregoing two), how to customize the theme, and ‘advanced trickery’ (I have yet to plumb the depths thereof). The author frequently writes for Lifehacker, and if you want some real amazement, [...]
The Jewish Service heard ’round the world: Live from Aachen, Germany, October 29, 1944 “The memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; …The memory of death will serve as a shield against death” – Elie Wiesel Nobel Lecture, 1986 This touching reminder appears at the end of a video presentation on the October 29, 1944 Jewish broadcast in Aachen, Germany. After a month of bitter fighting, [...]
The diatribe against Obama is racist, I have proof Maureen Dowd excellently encapsulates the problem at the root of some – though certainly not all – of the reactionary right-wing. Up ’til now, I’d have loved to pretend that racism really doesn’t exist except in hidden, smirking, low-class and dank corners of our society. It’s certainly my experience that people are far more virulently [...]
What changed between 2000-2008 This map gives a good start. Perhaps it doesn’t sum up all the changes of the Bush years, and perhaps it’s just meant to surprise. But our world changed mightily in less than a decade, and this collection of statistics is an excellent attempt at a summation. Source
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation Commisserate with expectations, Jon Stewart made fun of both Republicans and Democrats for their behavior during the final confirmation of Justice Sotomayor. The Republicans, in moves which were widely expected, clung to the same tired canards about racism and empathy-based judgment. (Of course, Justice Sotomayor has herself yet to prove how she will judge in [...]
No Reservations: Australia The Bourdain maverick posturing can be a bit much at times, but he’s still both damn smart and damn entertaining, and his is the best travel program on television, and probably the best food show as well. The new season is airing now, and I caught the Australia episode tonight. It was a good one, [...]
‘Big Love’, in limited doses: 2009 Emmy nominations Good for Breaking Bad and Big Love, though it’s a wonder how they can pick the latter for Drama and not nominate any of the actresses. As a lonely fan of the minisculely-rated Damages, I can inform you that it didn’t deserve a nomination for S2, which was a mess. Glenn Close yes, everything else, [...]
Breaking down the ‘Breaking Bad’ S2 finale !SPOILERS to follow! I’m not quite sure. What. To do. With that. The components of this series are superb: acting, writing, direction; execution and variation from episode to episode. I’ve been slowly and steadily hooked over the past several weeks, and much of that had to do with its ability to keep me off-balance and [...]
