The Magnificent Minorities. Denzel Washington leads his black, brown, red and yellow gunslingers in cleaning up the Old West. Kinda like how black, brown, red and yellow people are still cleaning up the Modern Alt-West. In THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, director Antoine Fuqua, praying at the altar of Kurosawa, Leone and Eastwood, crafts a majestic modern take on this paean to … Read More
THE EXPERIMENT
Inhuman Nature IS Human Nature. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. — Kurt Vonnegut, “Mother Night.” Based on the infamous 1972 Stanford Prison Experiment, THE EXPERIMENT brings a group of men together in a mock prison, randomly choosing some to be guards and some to be prisoners. The … Read More
PANDORUM
Pablum-orum. PANDORUM is One Great Idea subsumed by all the bloodied action and trapped-in-space mayhem and frenzied filmstock required to hold a modern audience’s attention. But it frenzies up well, which accounts for its style-over-substance cucumber rating. Top-notch set design, direction, editing, all creating a claustrophobic impression of a star cruiser too long in space. Though PANDORUM is rife with … Read More
TWILIGHT NEW MOON
Dead – and Mumbling It. Kristen Stewart mumbles her way through another TWILIGHT movie. Synopsis of NEW MOON on the BluRay cover: “In the second chapter of Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling TWILIGHT series, the romance between mortal Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen gets more intense.” And by more intense, they mean he almost gets to second base. Stewart once again … Read More
EASY A
THE SCARLET LETTER for Generation Nerd. How quaint: Emma Stone pastes a letter ‘A’ onto her A-cups. Drawing heavily on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, EASY A brings the 17th century pariah adulteress into modern times, setting the story in an American high school, where outcast Olive (Stone) does a favor for a gay nerd at her school by pretending … Read More
TWILIGHT
Bloodless. A chick falls in love with a fey vampire. They don’t have sex. The End. Vampires used to be scary once. The iconography of the blood-drinking psychotic, the shape-shifting coffin-dweller, reached a horrifying zenith with the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker (published 1897). Then came the startling film NOSFERATU (1922). Modern media has progressively been bleeding out all the … Read More