Author Archive
Film Review – Of Silence
Jeremiah Sayys’s independent psychological horror film, Of Silence, is an enigma. The movie unravels slowly, dropping off clues here and there to broaden the story and to key you in to the events going on, but the more information I received, it felt like the…
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Film Review – Child’s Pose
Many movies ask how far a parent is willing to go to protect their child. In most of these movies, the parent and child are forces of good torn apart by malevolent agents and their drama is a cathartic struggle. In Child’s Pose, a Romanian…
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Film Review – Interior. Leather Bar.
James Franco starts off his trite “documentary,” Interior. Leather Bar. waxing philosophical about the implications of the impending legalization of gay marriage. Within the first few seconds he’s already humble-bragged about his studies at Yale (cough, cough) and said that one of his professors there,…
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Film Review – Inside Llewyn Davis
“We create our own unhappiness,” Willie Nelson says and, “the purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.” This isn’t an idea unique to Nelson – it’s the core of Buddhist philosophy – but the quote comes from…
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Film Review – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
When I was a young boy I had a toy, a thin rubber man in a bright red and blue outfit. He was just a generic toy purchased for less than a dollar somewhere, but when you’d grab his feet and his head or his…
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Film Review – The Counselor
In an early scene of The Counselor, Cormac McCarthy’s first work written directly for the screen, a diamond dealer informs the Counselor that the diamond he’s chosen for his fiancée is a cautionary stone. He might as well be describing the film he’s in, and…
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Film Review – Carrie (2013)
Sure, some could say that the old Brian De Palma version of Carrie (1976) needed a little dusting off—it feels a bit dated, what with the abrupt editing style, the gauzy cinematography, the low budget effects—but it also showcases bravura performances from both Sissy Spacek…
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Film Review – You Will Be My Son
A man fidgets in a crematorium next to a funeral director and wonders aloud if the ashes of the oak casket will mix with the ashes of the dead body inside, and the director obviously answers that they will. “He never did like oak. It…
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