Screen
Boring vampire sex
The fourth film in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn: Part 1 reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness...
Big emotions in small packages
All the best movies elicit our emotions — Roger Ebert famously called these movies “empathy machines” — but there is a fine line between...
Might be more fun
In the first 10 minutes of Power Rangers, an alien Bryan Cranston kills all the dinosaurs and a high-school kid performs bestiality. Things get...
Lower-case Spielberg
In general, I’m not a big fan of holding artists accountable to the standard set by their best work. Making something “good” after making something “great,” doesn’t mean that the good thing is any less objectively good or that the great thing is any more great. What ...
A live-action Looney Tunes cartoon
Wes Anderson’s cinematic style did not appear fully formed. It took a few movies over five years before Anderson locked in on formal compositions,...
Seuss is spinning
The new animated feature The Lorax, known in its entirety as Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax to keep it straight from “John Grisham’s The Lorax,” does a few smaller things right but the bigger things not quite. I’ve come to fear these movies. I love Seuss so much, even his ...
Locally-sourced cinema
Culture is homegrown in Boulder County — from breweries to art. In her latest documentary, Colorado Hopped — Bine to Brew, Longmont filmmaker Barbara Hau paired the two...
Grindhouse ground out
I have a friend who tells this one joke where it takes an eternity to get to the punch line. And that’s the real joke: that you donated so much of your time for such a small amount of pleasure. The psychology behind my friend’s “humor” has apparently become writer/...
‘How it feels to be black’
Rediscovering Gordon Parks with Criterion’s release of ‘The Learning Tree’
