Sunday, October 9th, 2011
My Joy
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But Sergei Loznitsa’s joy is, well, My Joy—even if its own jollity is purely titular. A swinish-looking man, sweat draining down the flaps of his ushanka, smiles nervously as he expounds his philosophy of life—mind-your-own-business non-interference—to a captive audience comprising a solitary, steely-eyed hitcher. Amidst this [...]
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Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
Contagion
Right before the lights went down and Contagion got underway, my buddy asked if this was a bad movie for us to be sharing popcorn at; and for the first few minutes, my answer was a withering “Uh-huh….” Steven Soderbergh lingers a few extra seconds on a much-fingered bowl of peanuts at a bar in [...]
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Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Sucker Punch
The beer in my gut from before I hit Sucker Punch doesn’t preclude me from knowing what the film was about; I only wish it did. The trailer had me fooled that maybe Zack Snyder, directing his own material for the first time, had gone ballistic in a redeemable, wacko-Zacko way. I’ve successfully evaded his [...]
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Thursday, December 30th, 2010
Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler was near-great. It may have been diffuse around the edges, but it had Mickey Rourke for its beating heart—and Marisa Tomei just out of his reach. Released to theaters between President Obama’s election and inauguration—and on the heels of the economic crunch—it gave an “ordinary” American workingman the chance to do [...]
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Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
The Last Exorcism
In nervous times, such as our own, the rationale behind exorcism may seem a relief. It bolsters the iffy notion that internal evil is an external force—one which can be removed by the religious equivalent of a trained exterminator. There’s also a grain of masochistic chic hidden in there, the same congenital backwardness that once [...]