In the last four weeks, Hop has split the top box office spot with the also animated, three-lettered Rio and the alliterative Fast Five, grossing 105 million dollars in the United States and over 160 million dollars worldwide. Initially, my concern over this movie revolved around the notion that Easter bunnies were able to defecate jelly beans, […]
Pardon the superlative, but one of the most overlooked movies of the past ten years has to be Wonder Boys, a film directed by Curtis Hanson that follows Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), an English Professor who deals with a crumbling marriage of his own undoing, a long-term affair that has been impregnated with, well, pregnancy, the visit of […]
In Revelations, Death will eventually enter on a pale horse followed by Hell, to whom “power was given […] over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth”; however, it seems the apocalypse is equally foretold when an unstoppable money-making force meets […]
Admittedly, when No Impact Man: The Documentary first popped up on Netflix, my first instinct was to watch it with the sole purpose of tearing it apart. Why? I’m not really sure. Perhaps I wanted to expose Colin Beaven as an advantageous entrepreneur whose desire to become an activist for a year better served his need to […]
While this spring is riddled with the resonance of winter, summer can always be looked forward to, where eventually the threats of storm warnings and advisors will die away. And summer will soon bring the perfunctory celluloid sales pitches, striving to draw each of us to the biggest “blockbuster” or “action-packed thrill ride of the year,” replete […]
Over the weekend, Hard Candy was cast into the “Not bad, but probably not going to watch this film again” pile, not so much because of the pedophile-based subject matter, but because – in general – anyone being castrated on screen freaks me out. Although, for the record, I am very anti-pedophilia. Despite being Salvador Dali’s worst […]
Admittedly, there’s little to be said about Taxi Driver that hasn’t been noted already. Scorsese’s 1976 look at slightly off-kilter cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a noir-style classic that avoids flashiness and focuses on how the “filth” and “sleaze” in one’s environment can cause someone to “thank God for the rain to wash the trash off […]
Mar16
Confession of a Superhero – I’d Be Green Lantern to Make My Love of Rings More Socially Acceptable
Working for many years as a waiter and bartend in high-end Manhattan restaurants, I found myself wearing standard-issue ties by designers who turned on customers but left me indifferent. The required color schemes and brands sent me to various stores from Calvin Klein to Nautica, searching for the appropriate shade of blue that created an innocuous, harmless […]
A few years ago, I sat on a jury that was charged with deciding the innocence or guilt of an eighteen-year-old Dominican male who had been charged with second-degree murder, allegedly getting into an altercation over a gold chain inside a bar and then leaving, only to return with a pistol with which he fired four bullets […]
The main quandary surrounding the 2010 documentary Catfish is whether it is real or staged, but this is one of those documentaries for which the validity of the footage matters less than the message being conveyed. Sure, that sounds a bit hokey and conjures memories of James Frey being praised and then lambasted by Oprah, who bought […]