As the New York City Sanitation Department is condemned for their lackadaisical performance during last week’s blizzard, I gaze out my window at the piles of uncollected garbage that fill our New York City street, so it seems appropriate to make a brief list of the rubbish movies that I saw this year. Now, just for clarification, […]
Two of my guilty pleasures are Under Siege and The Rock, which might be the only Nicolas Cage movie that doesn’t make bile creep up my throat. However both of these movies have one thing in common: they advertise themselves as action movies, guaranteeing an adequate amount of dialogue to fashion semi-plausible plot lines and provide some […]
Celebrities and performers are easy subjects for films because they personify qualities that many of us desire: affluence, success, and perhaps even fame. At the same time, their shellacked visage is often the creation of another, a doppelganger to themselves, a disguise to generate capital and cultivate a brand. As this visage sometimes cracks, the embryonic person […]
About six months ago, I sat in The Penny Farthing, a bar in the East Village of Manhattan, and four of us at the table waxed philosophical about what we would do should we encounter a wild animal, being that the abundance of squirrels, rats, and pigeons in Manhattan – and raccoons in deep Queens – suggests […]
In The Wrestler, Aronofsky gave the audience an entertainer past his prime, wallowing in the remnant glow of stardom, listening to the death-rattle din of a once mighty cheering section. In Black Swan, we are offered a glimpse at Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), the performer who teeters on the precarious apex of her prime, one younger, fresher […]
As I sat amidst a pile of shredded wrapping paper, finishing my last syrup-soaked pancake, I flipped on A Christmas Story, once again watching a child regaled with the dangers of firearms. He did in fact come close to shooting his eye out, and yet, there is still debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment. Clearly, […]
Dec22
The Fighter – A Novel Approach to the Boxing Genre, Also a PSA and the Pilot for The Lowell Shore
For the second time in two weeks, I will do my best to avoid puns during this post, particularly the ubiquitously uncreative “knockout” that has been used in most every review whether it be about Mark Wahlberg’s performance (really) or most often Chistian Bale’s. For starters, The Fighter could have been terrible, and there were so many […]
Admittedly, my reaction to the new William S. Burroughs Documentary A Man Within is probably rather skewed because of my familiarity with the Beat Generations and the authors therein. That said, the documentary itself was rather disappointing in that most of the information conveyed could have been located on Wikipedia or doing a random Google search. Objectively, […]
In a New York City subway, there are a number of ubiquities: the rats that scamper and scurry close to your feet, reminding you that if all 40 million of them ever chose to form a union and revolt, you would be in a bubonic heaven; garbage canisters that overflow and become less a receptacle and more […]
A review of Unstoppable is an exercise in avoiding train-related puns. I will do my very best to avoid noting whether or not the movie stays on track or goes off the rails, whether Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) conducts himself in a manner appropriate for a man whose been “railroading for 28 years,” even though he could […]