Films set in a different culture than your own can be challenging. What is familiar to those entrenched in the culture can seem odd to those looking from the outside in. The outsider views the film from one angle while those on the inside may see it quite different. Enter A Separation, an Iranian film …
Tag Archives: PG-13
Way late review: Another Earth
The odds of finding two dramas with female leads dealing with depression set to a sci-fi backdrop released in the same year seems unlikely. I thought Melancholia would fill that niche but that was until I watched Another Earth. Rhoda (Brit Marling) is smart. She’s going to attend MIT and study astrophysics. That was the …
Way late review: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
What was Brad Bird (director of cartoon magic like The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille) thinking when he grabbed the reins of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol? For all its star power and name recognition, Mission Impossible is often just what its title says. I am stunned that Bird did what others could not …
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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: A Better Life
Proving that making a point doesn’t have to happen as a result of preaching, A Better Life successfully tells the simple story of an illegal immigrant Carlos (Demián Bichir) who struggles to make ends meet while keeping his teenage son, Luis (José Julián), away from the gangs of East L.A. There is no doubt, A …
Way late review: Project Nim
If the story of a chimp raised by humans told in Project Nim sounds vaguely familiar to the blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes, there’s a good reason for that. The screenwriters for Rise were well aware of Nim, the chimp whom scientists wanted to see if they could teach sign language as …
Way late review: Contagion
Sterile. That is the first word that comes to mind when describing Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which is strange considering the film centers on a killer disease that threatens to finish off all of mankind. Maybe the paradox of a cold and calculated film about a disgusting and deadly disease is intentional. Outbreak it is not. …
Way late review: Warrior
I didn’t really intend on watching Warrior so soon after watching the entire Rocky saga. Netflix has this way of sometimes sending discs in not quite the order you expect. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to watch a movie that was likely so close to the Rocky flicks. Tom (Tom Hardy) and Brendan …
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 …
Way late review: Moneyball
Baseball, America’s past time. That is not what the movie Moneyball (based on the best selling book of the same name by one of my favorite authors, Michael Lewis) is about. Nor is it about sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball metrics that overcomes the subjective with the objective. True, baseball and sabermetrics are key to …