Ladies and gentlemen, the 2012 Academy Awards best picture, The Artist. Spoiler alert. It won’t make my top 20 movies of 2011. I hesitated watching last year’s best picture for a while because the premise wasn’t all that appealing. I finally decided the time had come. I didn’t view it with drudgery nor with anticipation …
Tag Archives: 3 stars
Way late review: Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians
Some like to defend their behavior based on (for lack of a better term) the Robin Hood principle, which is taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It is not uncommon to hear this defense when someone is caught in an illegal activity but the person is known to contribute to their community. …
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Way late review: Nursery University
I’m glad I’m not a parent living in New York City. As Nursery University shows us, there are a lot of parents living in NYC who have lost their minds, and it’s all over enrolling their child into the perfect nursery school. The documentary follows several families in New York City wading through the treacherous …
Way late review: Days of Heaven
Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven shows what remained of the director’s interest in more traditional forms of storytelling. Like his more recent films, beautiful cinematography and stream of conscience voice over narration are dominate. Missing are the elements that some would label as self-indulgent. I won’t go quite that far, but let’s just say that …
Way late review: Like Crazy
Capturing the raw emotion of two people who believe they’ve found love at first sight is no small challenge for any film. Like Crazy attempted to do it on a relatively slim budget. And let there be no doubt, capturing the feelings of a couple who fall in love and then struggle to cement that …
Way late review: Hugo
Martin Scorsese’s love letter to cinema, Hugo, is like most love letters – full of passion, often beautiful, yet lacking in anything resembling a cohesive narrative. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan who keeps the clocks ticking behind a train station in Paris. Why he and almost everyone around him have British accents is …
Way late review: The Ides of March
George Clooney’s The Ides of March is a political thriller that attempts to thrill with the revelation that human beings are not inherently good. Not much of a revelation and not much of a thriller. Ides of March attempts to make grandiose gestures set to menacing music and shadowy backdrops but ultimately ends up being …
Way late review: Meek’s Cutoff
If Meek’s Cutoff is close at all to portraying the life of those braving the conditions of the Oregon Trail in 1845 then it was incredibly brutal and, at the same time, a little boring to observe. Of course, no one was observing it. That’s what those of us in this century get to do …
Way late review: Best Worse Movie
Is it any less bold to claim that you’ve made the worst movie ever or that you’ve made the best? Both are relative claims and hold little validity either way. Troll 2, the focus of the documentary Best Worse Movie, is said to be the worst movie ever. The zero (or near zero) scores on …
Way late review: Quigley Down Under
Some actors are easy for me to believe in a historical setting while others are not. Tom Selleck falls in the hard to believe category. It’s no fault of his own. He’s not a bad actor but put him in a period piece where he’s a sharp shooting American cowboy, Matt Quigley, and I find …