Author Archive
Film Review – Tai Chi Zero
Since the 1960s, kung fu movies have persisted through an evolutionary series of sub-genres. They started as period pieces, then transferred slowly to a more modern-day setting, before taking off into the nether realms of science fiction and then circling back to period pieces again.…
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Film Review – The Master
It’s apparent that director Paul Thomas Anderson is in love with the language of film. Every shot in one of his movies is framed and draped with so much attention to detail, and filled with so much enthusiasm for what is being delivered, that it…
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Film Review – Cosmopolis
In the world of literary author Don DeLillo practically everything is metaphor. His stories are filled with symbolic messages and societal commentary. Cosmopolis is perhaps DeLillo’s most distilled novel of societal and economic commentary. It is lean, concise, and full of the kind of technically…
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Film Review – Searching for Sugar Man
In 1971 a musician by the name of Rodriguez released a debut album entitled Cold Fact. At the time of its recording, Rodriguez was considered by many of his peers to be the next big thing. His producers (including Mike Theodore, who is notable for a…
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Film Review – Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
It’s absurd. Let’s just get that out of the way, first and foremost. A story presupposes that the untold part of history surrounding perhaps the greatest leader the United States has ever had is that he was the greatest vampire slayer ever. And while the…
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Film Review – That’s My Boy
There was a pivotal moment in Adam Sandler’s career in 2002, when he starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. Anderson took the volatile, unstable behavior Sandler exhibited as immature, comedic fodder in such films as Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore and channeled it…
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Film Review – Prometheus
Early twentieth-century writer of the macabre H.P. Lovecraft once wrote: “Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute…
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SIFF Film Review – The Dragon Pearl
When I was a kid, it always aggravated me when something tried to placate me for being a kid. Movies, books, television shows. It didn’t matter. Those things made me hate things targeted for kids, for the most part. It always made me seek out…
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