Screen
An orgy of one
Why do you want to dance?
Why do you want to live?
Well, I don’t know exactly why, but I must.
That’s my answer too.
—Boris Lermontov and...
Requiem for a studio musician
Have you heard of The Wrecking Crew? The musical geniuses behind “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” “California Dreamin’,” “Good Vibrations” and more? No? Are you sure...
Friendly skies ‘Up In The Air’
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) has a job that keeps him flying 200 days/ year in Up In The Air — he’s a corporate downsizer brought in to fire excess employees. It’s a tough job and Bingham has made a career out of detaching, disassociating from anything that could ...
Mommy issues
A mother is on trial for murdering her child. We know how, but not why. Nor does the mother. She does not deny the...
Hugh catch a predator?
If you like smiling and aren’t criminally demented, Prisoners is a damn rough watch. Stuffed to the gills with child abduction, overmedicated depression and familial implosions, director Denis Villeneuve’s bloated whodunit is a puppy suicide away from the most ...
Dwarfing expectations
We are masters of cynicism, proudly sporting a black belt in backlash. If this generation of critics, pseudo-critics and armchair-article-writing audience members given the bully pulpit of social media has any legacy, it will be bitching for bitching’s sake...
Close to something
In one of the most insightful, clever comments in a movie surprisingly devoid of insightful, clever comments, backup singer Janice Pendarvis notes, “When you think about the history of pop music and all the memorable hooks that most people sing along with, they’re ...
White people nearly died
The 2004 tsunami that struck Eastern Asia was the sixth deadliest “act of God” in recorded history and quieted just fewer than 300,000 lives. The first major motion picture to tackle the subject, The Impossible, is about a group of white folks who get injured and ...
Twentieth-century mogul
For 50 years, Scott Eyman’s been collecting string. The author of over a dozen books on Hollywood history has a deep collection of research...