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Scratching in the Dirt: Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back
As a Peter Gabriel fan for over two decades, it’s difficult to admit that I find myself struggling to appreciate his first new album in many years. There have always been three core things to love about Gabriel’s work: his literate songwriting, meticulous soundscapes, and emotionally expressive voice. Behind the creepily organic album art, Scratch…
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A Problem With the Whole World: Dennis Hopper’s Colors
Dennis Hopper’s Colors may be a buddy cop flick on the surface, but it’s hardly typical high-concept Hollywood material. It does have a token overarching plot (involving a mismatched pair of cops tracing the perpetrators of a drive-by shooting), but it’s merely a loose thread to hold the movie together. If neither a character study…
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Answering Questions With More Questions: Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
Put simply, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is a clip show done right, albeit in disguise as an original movie for television. Whatever else its intended purpose, it must also do double-duty as a kind of coda, appendix, or postscript to the celebrated television series (2004-2009). But is it one final cash-in, before the sets are…
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Drew Barrymore’s Whip It skates around conflict
Writer Shauna Cross and director Drew Barrymore’s Whip It is frustratingly averse to dramatic conflict. Rather than finding resolutions, or allowing issues to evolve in interesting ways, it skates around nearly every incident: Bliss’ (Elliot Page) love interest at first appears to have cheated on her, but in fact didn’t, so the worst you can…
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Pandorum is all premise and no logic
I rented Christian Alvart’s Pandorum solely on the strength of the premise: two men awake from suspended animation, on a spaceship, in a locked room, not knowing where they are, what their mission is, or if there even is a mission. It’s well cast with Dennis Quaid and the very intense Ben Foster. This is…
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Before the Fall: The Caprica SyFy Series Premiere
The recently concluded television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) was critically acclaimed and much beloved by a relatively small group of fans and critics that appreciated the brainy show’s bleak, pessimistic view of humanity. It will certainly live forever as a classic achievement in television, but the common consensus is that it failed to reach the…
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I’m With Arsenio
I’m with Arsenio.
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This’ll Ruin My Day: James Cameron Goes Down the Digital Rabbit Hole in Avatar
Avatar is the perfect distillation of all of James Cameron’s worst tendencies: an obsession with the marine corps (while trying to have it both ways: worshipping the hardware and lingo, but casting them as villains), embarrassingly heinous dialogue (undercutting every dramatic moment with somebody droning flat one-liners like “oh shit” or “this’ll ruin my day”),…
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Laurence Olivier wrestles Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil
Franklin J. Schaffner’s The Boys From Brazil is one of those they-don’t-make-them-that-way-anymore that I miss: the paranoid thriller that blends sci-fi with politics. I’m thinking Coma, The Manchurian Candidate, and Jacob’s Ladder. It’s often a fool’s errand to complain about plausibility in genre flicks, but I think internal consistency is a reasonable baseline. So I’m…
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What Did I Ever Do to You? David Mamet’s Homicide
Detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) comes to see himself as torn between two discrete worlds in David Mamet‘s Homicide (1991). Only when maneuvered into a position in which he must choose, the duality unravels and he finds he is no one special and belongs nowhere in particular. Gold’s partner Sullivan (William H. Macy) has an…
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The Time Has Come to Act: Stanley Tucci’s The Impostors
I’m not blind to its shortcomings, but The Impostors is one of my most favorite movie comfort foods. That I find it so funny and purely enjoyable is really saying something, considering its milieu is the joblessness, desperation, and looming international conflict of The Great Depression. The pitch: a loving homage to old-school Hollywood screwball…
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The Pod People Film Festival: The Invasion
Nicole Kidman must be one of the unluckiest stars in Hollywood, having recently starred in at least two big-budget catastrophes. Frank Oz’s The Stepford Wives (2004) was sabotaged by cast members dropping out, extensive reshoots, and competing script revisions that left significant logical plot holes in the finished film. Next, Invasion is best described as…