-
Hemlock Anyone? Room for Panic Some film producers have been in their own rooms too long. They need to get out more, take a walk, watch some children playing at the local park… Having seen the trailer for David Fincher’s Panic Room, I pretty much knew the whole story. Jodie Foster plays a woman, separated…
-
He’s Not the Only One Depressed: Luther, the Film The one line that most viewers of the Luther film will remember, and there were not that many viewers – “Most days, I’m so depressed I can’t even get out of bed.” This from the father of the Protestant Reformation as he suffered the heaviness of…
-
The best thing about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the story’s author J.K. Rowling, whose imaginative conjuring of the world of Hogwart’s School of Witchery and Wizardry, with all of its fresh details and vivid characters, can only be compared with L. Frank Baum’s Oz or C.S. Lewis Narnia. There is a magic…
-
Easily the best film of a very forgettable year in film, Chicago showed that the film musical still has some force in today’s Hollywood. Granted, Renee Zeilweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere cannot compare in talent to the likes of Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly; but the sheer visual energy and narrative play…
-
I read recently that Hollywood will be turning more toward human interest stories in the wake of the recent national terror, an acknowledgement that perhaps, just perhaps, the loss of human decency that has so marked Hollywood films over the last two decades might be having a negative effect on the culture. Imagine that. It…
-
The Coming of Age in a Synthetic World: the High Score Girl Series High Score Girl is a recent video-game inspired romantic comedy framed for television and aimed at millennials. It originally found success as a comic “manga” in 2010 by Rensuke Oshikiri, and just that much tells you quite a bit. The series promises…
-
Sometimes films are more interesting for what they represent than for what they are. Such was the case with Penny Marshall’s Riding In Cars with Boys, a film I reviewed in November, and such is the case now with Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies. I had fun searching the web for background material on this…
-
by Peter Fraser with David Carson Perhaps we all harbor a secret desire to test our metal against the most daunting forces of nature. How to satisfy that desire in the modern world is the challenge. The possibility of a Jack London-styled adventure has grown all the more exotic in our technology-driven society where common…
-
Pop icons arise and fade according to the changing needs of the culture. It has been so since mass culture was birthed from the industrial fires of the late nineteenth century. Who was the “It Girl”? And why? Does anyone still know that if you wanted a quotable on any subject at the beginning of…
-
Nothing beats a good short story, one that captures the whole of a life in some subtle gesture. The lifting of a cork from the floor, a boy turning away from a booth at a bazaar, a servant with the legs of a dying man on his shoulders-these images from the masters (Carver, Joyce, Tolstoy)…
