Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy in RoboCop. When Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop burst onto screens in 1987 it caused a sensation, primarily because of its excessive violence but also because of its cutting edge special effects. It also played out as a right-wing fantasy in which law and order was dispensed with impunity, with the title […]
Chuck Koplinski
Posted inArts & Culture
Monuments Men missing momentum
George Clooney as Frank Stokes George Clooney’s The Monuments Men has the sort of pedigree that Oscar winners are made of. What with an all-star cast, including former Academy Awards recipients Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Jean Dujardin (as well as Clooney) and Bill Murray, John Goodman and Bob Balaban, as well as a subject matter […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lego joy
A scene from The Lego Movie. PHOTO COURTESY WARNER BROS. PICTURES With Hasbro having turned G.I. Joe and Transformers into successful franchises, I suppose it was only a matter of time before they built a feature around those little plastic blocks from Denmark that I cuss at every time I step on one with bare […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Noble, moving tribute
Taylor Kitsch, Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster and Emile Hirsch in Lone Survivor. PHOTO COURTESY UNIVERSAL PICTURES Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor contains the most revelatory opening credits sequences I’ve seen in a long time. Composed of various documentary film clips, it quickly compresses the basic training regime that potential Navy Seals undergo. Grueling and beyond reason, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dysfunction at a gallop
Meryl Streep, Ewan McGregor and Julia Roberts in the film August: Osage County. PHOTO COURTESY THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County is the sort of work that makes you take stock of yourself and your life. After seeing this story of a dysfunctional Oklahoma family that’s lorded over by a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A cautionary tale about our fading feelings
Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore in Spike Jonze’s film, Her. Though Spike Jonze’s Her takes place during some undisclosed time in the near future, it couldn’t be more timely. And while its premise seems absurd on the surface – a man falls in love with the operating system on his phone?!? – as the film progresses […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Payne and Dern find modest nobility in Nebraska
Bruce Dern as Woody Grant and Will Forte as David Grant in Nebraska. PHOTO COURTESY PARAMOUNT VANTAGE’S NEBRASKA Director Alexander Payne knows that it’s hard to find fulfillment in what Hollywood pejoratively refers to as the “flyover states” – that vast part of the country that stretches from east to west from Missouri to Utah […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mitty a magical tribute to the possible
Ben Stiller While I would hardly call it cutting edge cinema, Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a rather risky proposition in this day and age. As the poet, philosopher and sports agent Jerry Maguire once said, “We live in a cynical world,” and as such we’re always on guard, weary of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Homefront runs on autopilot
It’s never good when your mind starts wandering while watching a movie. To be sure, it is the rare film that keeps you in rapt attention from start to finish, but when you begin thinking about how much money each of the actors got in order to throw good judgment out the door or what […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Spike Lee delivers twisted noir with Oldboy
While directors M. Night Shyamalan (Remember him? The Sixth Sense ring a bell?) and Spike Lee have both had to abandon their independent ways and have essentially become filmmakers for hire, at the very least you can say that the latter has managed to inject a bit of his unique style into the studio projects […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bale and Harrelson formidable duo in Furnace
Woody Harrelson as Curtis DeGroat and Christian Bale as Russell Baze in Out of the Furnace. PHOTO CREDIT BY KERRY HAYES. While writing his follow-up to 2009’s Crazy Heart, director Scott Cooper had Christian Bale in mind for the lead role in what was to become Out of the Furnace. He even went so far […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Frozen upholds strong Disney tradition
In 1989, after suffering an unusually long draught where successful animated features were concerned, Disney Studios released The Little Mermaid, a blockbuster musical cartoon based on a Hans Christian Anderson tale that righted the Mouse Factory’s floundering ship and marked the beginning of the modern resurgence of the animated feature film. With their latest, Frozen, […]
