The gangster film has made a resounding comeback this year with Road to Perdition and Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited Gangs of New York. The genre began in the silent era, but it made its first big splash in the early 1930s with the releases of Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface. All three are still highly […]
Film – Chuck Koplinski
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Movie Reviews
Far From Heaven Much has been made of Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, his homage to the films of 1950s director Douglas Sirk. Coming to prominence in 1954 with Magnificent Obsession and followed by All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, Sirk dared to peek beneath the veneer of the American Dream, exposing […]
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Movie Reviews
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle I tried. I really tried to get into the world of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, a place were the laws of physics don’t apply and hot babes survive massive car crashes and explosions without a hair out of place. I did my best to believe director McG is fashioning a new […]
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Movie Review
Alex and Emma After director Rob Reiner bombed with his last two films–1996’s Ghosts of Mississippi and 1999’s The Story of Us–he returns to familiar territory with Alex and Emma, a delightful romantic comedy that borrows heavily from two of his biggest hits, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally. The premise is more […]
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Movie Reviews
Chicago Using the classic musical form as a foundation and throwing in just a dose of MTV razzle dazzle, Rob Marshall’s Chicago is the musical Moulin Rouge wanted to be. Chicago shows far more restraint than Baz Luhrmann’s overrated exercise in excess by eschewing MoulinRouge’s seizure-inducing editing. Instead, Marshall favors sharply choreographed dance numbers executed […]
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Movie Review
2 Fast 2 Furious A more apt title for Universal’s sequel to its surprise 2001 hit The Fast and the Furious, would be 2 Stupid 2 Boring. Director John Singleton and his screenwriters jettisoned everything that was interesting and exciting about the original, replacing them with, well, nothing really. Perhaps Singleton believes in doing things […]
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Movie Reviews
Bend It Like Beckham Fox Searchlight Pictures has gone out of its way to tout the British import Bend it Like Beckham as the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s easy to see why. Both feature repressed female heroines in the unenviable position of having to reject rigid cultural conventions and familial traditions. Both […]
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Movie Reviews
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind You can tell that veteran actor George Clooney has wanted to direct for a long time. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, his directorial debut, he uses elaborate camera moves, meticulously choreographed scenes, various film stock and video footage, and a non-linear narrative line to adapt game show producer Chuck […]
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Bombay Invasion
I saw the most popular Indian film of 1997 in an art-deco movie palace in Calcutta. The actors spoke Hindi, and the film wasn’t subtitled, but I could still figure out what was going on. That’s because the movie Judaai lifted its plot from the Hollywood tearjerker Indecent Proposal. In Indecent Proposal a billionaire playboy […]
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Summer preview 2003
The summer movie season is upon us, bringing the latest batch of sequels, remakes of TV shows, and star-driven action and comedy vehicles, all with hefty budgets. Money buys spectacle, but it represses creativity–originality is too risky when so much is at stake. Hollywood, much more than Washington, is in serious need of finance reform. […]
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Movie Review – Down With Love
Down With Love Is it a romantic comedy or a Mad parody of one? Down With Love, directed with great panache by Peyton Reed (Bring It On), works as both, providing big laughs and an affectionate nod at a quaint sub-genre relegated to the realm of afternoon airings on the Turner Classic Movies network. Down […]
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Never screened in Springfield
Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, which took place last month in Champaign-Urbana, always reminds local film buffs how limited our movie choices are here. Kerasotes has improved in recent years, but there are still numerous films that completely bypass Springfield. The local alternatives–the Route 66 Film Festival and the Springfield Arts Council’s foreign film series–offer […]
