Reviews and comments on movies & television
Neo Ned 2005. Not Rated. Director: Van Fischer. Renner plays Ned, a neo-Nazi criminal who has been committed to a mental institution The concept is eyebrow-raising: a white supremacist falls in love with a black woman who claims she’s the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. How can they pull this off without offending the majority of the audience and/or trivializing the subject matter? The...
12 and Holding 2005. Rated R. Director: Michael Cuesta. Renner plays Gus Maitland, a construction worker who is seeing a therapist. Dealing as it does with the aftermath of a child’s tragic death, this could easily have been a depressing film. Instead, it takes an eccentric and sometimes humorous approach in its portrayal of the ensuing months in the lives of the dead child’s twin...
Dahmer 2002. Rated R. Director: David Jacobson. Renner plays Jeffrey Dahmer, notorious rapist, serial killer, and cannibal. I admit I was reluctant to watch this movie. I have no particular interest in serial killers and do not enjoy the suspense of waiting for horrible things to happen. It was a relief to discover that, rather than being a gorefest, Dahmer is more of an arty psychological film...
Over a year since my last blog post – yikes! As a sort of catch-up, it seems appropriate to look back on what captured my attention in 2011. Looming like Mount Fuji over all other entertainments this past year was the HBO-produced TV show Game of Thrones and the book series that inspired it, George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire”. I had not read the books prior to watching the show, so I...
I originally saw Inception in theaters and was impressed by its intricate and imaginative visual look and layers of narrative. Leonardo DiCaprio was kind of stiff and boring, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy made up for him. The dreams were more like virtual reality constructs than what actually goes on in people’s minds while they sleep, but they were still involving, so I was fine with it...
I saw Avatar a second time and was struck by two thematic elements that come up repeatedly in the film. First, the theme of waking vs. dreaming. The very first lines of the script are Jake relating in voiceover how, while he was in the VA hospital, he had a dream that he was flying and was free, only to wake up and face the harsh reality of his paralysis. The mechanics of sleeping and waking are...
I saw Avatar in 3-D on New Year’s Eve. My expectations were very low as I walked into the theater. Pre-release interviews and pieces like this one by Annalee Newitz gave me the impression that the movie was a science fictional version of Dances with Wolves, a futuristic tale of noble savages and the white man who “goes native” to save them because they can’t save themselves. Grr. I’m also a CGI...
I just watched the first episode of Joss Whedon’s web musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is hilarious, in the vein of silly superhero creations like The Tick and Mystery Men, but with Sondheim-esque compositions! It stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and Nathan Fillion! It was independently produced by Joss and his relations! It is the future of entertainment financing...
This blog has been silent for way too long, so I decided to write a series of “best of 2007” posts. Originally it was going to be one piece, but now that I’ve written up the film and TV section, I realized that if I continued on at such length for the other sections (books & comics, music, and events) it would be one long winded post. So I’m starting smaller...
A few weeks ago Entertainment Weekly ran an interview with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, who are both starring in the new movie American Gangster. I was reading along, amused at their reminiscences of the only other movie they’ve both been in, Virtuosity (a completely nonsensical piece of trash that I sat through only because I was on a Russell Crowe kick at the time), when I was totally...