Tag: Sean Penn
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When happens when you tell the Bush Administration what they don’t want to hear: Fair Game
Doug Liman’s Fair Game is an important movie. The legacy of the Bush Administration’s war on terror comprises many grand injustices: civilian casualties, torture, increased resentment worldwide, eroded civil liberties, et al. In other words, lots of raw material for screenplays. Most treatments of the war on terror in movies so far have been fictional…
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Sad Dinosaurs: Calling Bullshit on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
As a public service, I will now summarize all 2 hours and 19 minutes of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life for you: My mommy was pretty, my daddy was mean, sometimes kids die, I inhaled too much DDT, and it makes me so sad. Sad like the lonely birth of the lifeless universe. Sad…
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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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Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s Milk
Any friend of this blog will know that I almost universally hate biopics. As I’ve complained in my reviews of Control, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and even Walk Hard, I believe that the feature film is fundamentally ill suited for biography. One seemingly minor lesson from college that wound up sticking with me…
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Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch go Into the Wild
Like many young men cursed with a privileged life of education and time to think for themselves, Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) wanted only a vaguely defined “truth” and to not have to rely on anyone. Synthesizing his reading of Henry Thoreau and Jack London, he imagined for himself a life of self-sufficiency in the wilderness.…
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11’09″01 – September 11
11’09″01 – September 11 is a portmanteau film comprised of shorts inspired by or in reaction to the September 11 attacks, made by directors from nearly every continent. At first, I thought for sure I would be giving this one more than three stars, but the quality of the short films takes a steep dive…