Tag Archive
The Tillman Story
There are few things more American than assumed ignorance. We’re the good guys; everyone else just doesn’t know any better and needs our help to get properly informed. If they’re not interested in our particular wares, we get suspicious or aggressive, whether it’s about Democracy, weapons, religion, or French Freedom French Fries. Amir Bar-Lev’s The […]
An Englishman in New York
As a divisive figure in the then-burgeoning gay rights movement, writer-actor Quentin Crisp is worthy of being given a lengthy biopic, or at least one that gives equal time to arguing the ways he both helped and harmed the gay cause. An Englishman in New York, which covers Crisp’s life as a latter day theater […]
Jennifer’s Body
Do you ever wonder if actors take advice from characters in their films in real life? Like perhaps Bruce Willis deciding that after Die Hard he would no longer walk around barefoot for any reason, you know, just in case terrorists shot up his house and he had to run around and avoid all the […]
World’s Greatest Dad
For all the mean-spirited humor and nasty comeuppances it contains as a movie, Heathers is rather tame. This isn’t the fault of screenwriter Daniel Waters, who envisioned a conclusion far darker than the comparatively quaint one used. Waters had planned a scene where Winona Ryder kills Christian Slater and then blows up the school and […]
Street Kings
“I woke up, and I was a cliché.” The fact that this isn’t the first line of dialogue in Street Kings, a new cop-thriller with Keanu Reeves, should be considered a missed opportunity. Opening with Reeves getting out of bed to a blaring alarm, fully clothed, hearing a neighborhood dog barking, loading his gun, stumbling […]
Garden State
Garden State manages a high wire act for the first hour, where writer/director/star Zach Braff plays the straight man to all the odd things that are going on around him. At any moment it could have fallen apart and become one of those films where everyone in the small town is kooky and colorful and […]