Screen
Crisis of context
I believe it’s a lack of context, not empathy. Because if it’s a lack of empathy, we’re screwed — doomed as a country, culture, maybe even species. The dismissal of the poor as bottom-feeding, system-exploiting moochers comes from not having a full perspective of ...
‘Spy Next Door’ is limp and lifeless
"Every day you get older," Butch Cassidy once griped to The Sundance Kid. "It's the law...
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...
‘Sherlock Holmes’ looks good, but no reinvention
I've been a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detail-oriented detective, Sherlock Holmes, for as long as I can remember. The Holmes canon is extraordinarily rich and directors as talented as Billy Wilder and Barry Levinson have tackled it with varying levels ...
Dull expectations
When an idiosyncratic talent seeks a wider audience for her work, there’s a danger in trading the offbeat for something more on-the-nose. This is what has happened in Friends With Kids, a smooth but frustrating third feature with an extremely good ensemble cast. In ...
2012, will you marry me?
I want the 2012 year-in-film to have my babies. Heck, I’ll have its babies; it has been so durn good I’d totally go seahorse for it. Before I reduce a year that renewed my cinematic soul to a series of arbitrary numbers and rankings, a quick caveat: Because ...
Hazy Hazings
Let’s start with something that’s apparently really, really hard for edgy comedy people to grasp: jokes about rape or the N-word suck, and you suck for using them. Yes, you are allowed to make them; they aren’t illegal or anything. But saying “nothing is off-limits ...
Falling down 12 steps
The ubiquitous hyperbolic after-school-special type of dramatization of the perils of alcoholism has lost its teeth; it no longer delivers a social bite so much as it gets drool everywhere. Thus, in many ways, what Smashed wanted to do is something necessary, as we ...
Reel to reel | Week of September 19, 2013
Afternoon Delight Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) is a quick-witted and lovable, yet tightly coiled, 30-something steeped in the creative class of Los Angeles’ bohemian, affluent Silver Lake neighborhood. Everything looks just right — chic modernist home, successful husband, ...
