Screen
Hawkes’ virginity Hunt-ed
America’s Puritanical origins mean that “sweetly sexual” may sound oxymoronic, but that phrase absolutely defines The Sessions, the softest and kindest movie to ever feature a star of Mad About You buck nekkid. Although nudity being “integral to the role” is a con ...
Reel to reel | Week of July 26, 2012
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Peter Parker gets a new look (and an origin story) in this Marvel remake of everyone’s favorite web slinger. Unlike Toby Maguire’s emo-esque rendition of the wall-crawler, actor Andrew Garfield’s portayal hopes to bring Spidey back to his ...
Metal Lurching
To walk in to The Man with the Iron Fists by choice is to give up your right to bitch about story and character. This is a movie written and directed by The RZA, a member of the powerhouse rap group The Wu-Tang Clan; produced by Eli Roth, the guy who made Hostel; and...
Learning the wrong lessons
An employee of the Chicago public school system, ha-cha seventh-grade educator Elizabeth, portrayed by Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, blows most of her classroom time showing her students (whose names she never learns) movies such as Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver and...
Take the psycho path
With massive mainstream media marketing rollouts and the box office boons reaped by free social media, movies so rarely surprise us these days. Shock cameos are spoiled in the space of a tweet, while most trailers render buying the proverbial “movie cow” moot when ...
‘The Messenger’ digs into a different side of the Army
America is an interesting country. Full of contradictions, hopes, failures and, every now and then, surprises. The nation is complex, to say the very least. Perhaps one of the clearest representations of these complexities is the war in Iraq...
reel to reel | Week of Sept. 29, 2011
50/50 When a young man is diagnosed with cancer, he and his best friend try to cope with the shock. Rated R. At Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks. — Los Angeles Times/MCT Abduction See full review Page 37. Rated PG-13. At Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks...
No-town music
At its worst, cinema verite is aimless pretense masquerading as artistic intent. At its best, it is Detropia, a documentary that adds soul to statistics, going inside the implosion of a once-proud city using a sprawling, haunting approach. That isn’t to say that ...
