Author Archive
Film Review – White House Down
Summer is here. And that means it’s blockbuster movie time—which, in turn, means the name of the game is now Hyperbole, and few directors sincerely and unabashedly approach hyperbole with such zeal and charisma as writer/director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 2012). The very nature of…
READ MORESIFF Film Review – Dirty Wars
In the redacted sentences and blacked-out names of a CIA report is a lie hidden in plain sight. An omission that’s been done for the greater good. It seems with access to more information comes more secrets. The kind where pulling on a thread doesn’t…
READ MOREFilm Review – The Prey (La Proie)
Inside almost every French action film is a standard set of genre parameters that helps define these movies as distinctly being French Action Films. There is of course always a set of parameters, or conventions, that make up a genre. The action film alone has…
READ MORESIFF Film Review – Fateful Findings
What we have here is what I’m calling a passion-tester—a true testament to the love of movies, or perhaps storytelling. It’s all on display, for better or worse: a menagerie of choices that ceaselessly walk the borderline between textbook and ill-conceived. It’s a bit of…
READ MOREFilm Review – Fast & Furious 6
Somewhere in this hypertensive ball of cars, crime, and machismo lays the display of something that resembles perpetual motion. The display looks like a series of films that not only refuse to die, but somehow pick up steam as they go, propelling themselves forward, using…
READ MOREFilm Review – Pain & Gain
Crime is tantamount to humor. At least that appears to be what Michael Bay thinks. This became apparent to me about a third of the way through his latest cinematic detour of social digression, somewhere around the second act mark, when three bodybuilding friends decide…
READ MOREFilm Review – Sun Don’t Shine
There’s something about the state of Florida that just feels illuminatingly dirty—bright sun and dirt; yellow and brown. It’s a washed-out stain that will never come clean, and it seems to permeate with a psychic sense of a violent, tragic past. The band Modest Mouse…
READ MOREFilm Review – Upstream Color
There’s a cadence to writer/director/actor Shane Carruth’s latest film Upstream Color that feels like poetry. Imagery, sound, and character combine in such a way that it overwhelmed me with its aesthetic of impressionism to the point of something that could almost be considered religious, depending…
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