Author: Chad Ossman
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Nick Broomfield doesn’t know what to believe about Kurt Cobain in Kurt & Courtney
Kurt & Courtney is a documentary by Nick Broomfield about the controversy surrounding the apparent suicide of Kurt Cobain. Not yet knowing he himself will become part of the story, Broomfield holds his cards pretty close to his chest throughout. It’s not until fairly late in the film that he begins to describe his own […]
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Spam Poem No. 1: “Here we come!”
In recent months I’ve noticed my spam becoming increasingly bizarre. Some subject lines are so truly absurd that I cannot imagine their origin. Are they simply really bad translations of, say, Russian or Portuguese? Are they random machine generations meant to foil spam filters? It’s a mystery. It has, however, made my daily batch of […]
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By Zeus’ beard, Oliver Stone’s Alexander is bad
Ugh. I should have listened to the myriad critics and friends who warned me off Oliver Stone’s Alexander… it is indeed quite bad. Everything you’ve heard is true: impossibly long, unintelligibly edited (can anyone explain to me Alexander’s supposedly brilliant scheme in the first battle? Running away and coming back will allow greater access to […]
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Bad Santa utterly wallows in its bah-humbug tone
This from the director of Crumb and Ghost World? The big pleasure of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa is definitely that it utterly wallows in a bah-humbug tone, a welcome tonic to the seemingly perpetual holiday season. I write this in June, and I’m afraid to so much as blink, lest the plastic Santas and X-mas […]
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John Woo’s Paycheck isn’t fun, weird, or subversive enough for a Philip K. Dick tale
When it comes to action cinema maestros like John Woo — I can enjoy the the hyped-up action and weirdness of something like Face/Off, but find that the extreme violence and gunplay can sometimes cross the line from escapism into being inhumane. Paycheck, scoring a mere PG-13 from the MPAA, is less violent than most […]
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The House of Yes feels stagebound
Theater and film, as media, differ in as many ways as they overlap. Just as with adapting a novel to a movie, there is no simple translation from one media to another — a play takes place from a fixed vantage point, there is no editing, and no digital/optical photographic effects. Perhaps the most extreme […]