In the production notes for the documentary The Girls In The Band, director Judy Chaikin explains her attempt to tell the untold stories of female jazz musicians from the late 1930s to the present, and on the surface this sounds like it may be eye-opening. I’m a moderate fan of jazz, mostly for the ol’ [...]
When it comes to house pets, one of the most common choices is a cat. These lovable furry creatures have been a prominent part of American culture that has come to include Animal Planet TV shows and even popular Youtube videos. Despite the appeal, there are still some issues regarding their well-being. The Paw Project [...]
Many films drawn from the small “Indie” bag have this lackadaisical, slacker, quirky vibe with intellectual and, at the same time, flippant dialogue that has grown in popularity in the last few years. Juno is a good example of the effectiveness of this style. Practically every Ellen Page, Michael Cera or Jesse Eisenberg film, for [...]
One of the films that can be seen at the upcoming Newport Beach Film Festival’s OCC Shorts event is director Nathan Laolagi’s A Revenge Story. The story follows David (Chris Gutierrez) as he seeks revenge for his dead sister only to land in a sticky situation with some violent guys in suits [...]
On paper, Midnight’s Children offers a little bit of something for everyone. It’s a mélange of every narrative genre you can think of: drama, romance, comedy, and even fantasy adventure. These are further broken down into stories of coming-of-age, historical fiction and war tragedy. But in its quest to be so many things, Midnight’s Children [...]
Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep is a complex, all-star thriller stockpiled with a lot of characters (and subsequently a lot of character actors) that ultimately believes it’s more important than it really is. It laboriously segues from one scene to the next, always developing its thick plot while introducing new people into it. A [...]
Thanks largely to MTV, spring break has become a holiday for young people looking for drugs, nudity, and rocking tunes. For many, it is that moment where priorities fall by the wayside in favor of heightening banal behavior. With a cast that puts the modern collective of Disney starlets in bikinis, a small role by [...]
Starbuck is the coming-of-age story about a grown man in a perpetual state of arrested development. We’ve seen movies like this before and we’ll certainly see them again, probably because the concept stems from the essential nature of men, who sometimes dream of a carefree, put-up-your-feet-and-kick-back kind of lifestyle. Most of us either know these [...]
The easy way to get people to see the Romanian film Beyond the Hills would be to market it as a traditional exorcism movie. Cut the trailer to make it look like a dark and chilling thriller about an impious girl who visits a rustic monastery, where the priest and nuns begin to suspect there’s an evil [...]
By definition, a society is a group of people working together as a community, having relationships, interacting and working with one another towards a common goal. The citizen actively participates in creating society. In Antonino D’Ambrosio’s documentary Let Fury Have the Hour, he examines the period in which Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher led two [...]
Director Steven Soderbergh has made a career out of making films on his watch. His one-two punch last year of Haywire and Magic Mike saw him continuing to take deviant subject matter and catapulting it into the zeitgeist. With the news that he is retiring this year, he has claimed that his recent film Side [...]
It’s rare when a narrative film simply observes its characters—living, talking, pondering, or making observations of their own. Nowadays, we’re used to urgent, fast-paced stories, in which something functional is always happening, either to drive the plot or galvanize the audience. Perhaps subconsciously, we’ve come to associate these qualities with a film having purpose. This [...]
Multi-hyphenate movie maker Quentin Dupieux is someone who cannot be accused of being contrived. In 2010, he released Rubber – a meta comedy of the horror genre and the absurdity of movie logic, all from the perspective of its protagonist: a killer rubber tire. While not a complete success, it was tonally confident and established [...]
High school is hell. I’m convinced it may actually be the missing tenth circle from Dante’s Inferno. Part of it is simply the nature of adolescence. Being a teenager is one of the most awkward extended moments any given person will experience in their lifetime. Which makes high school a sort of Petri dish where [...]
The Sweeney is a typical crime story movie forged by filmmakers who’ve likely seen one too many crime story movies. They know the genre so well, in fact, the movie ends up being just that: generic. It contains its fair share of pumped up action, emotional substance and characters that are more likable than developed, but [...]