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 […]
Movies
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
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
Spring Breakers: Great and Terrible
In The Wizard of Oz (1939), a young farm girl from Kansas wishes for excitement and gets more than she bargained for when a cyclone lands her in Oz, a bizarre alternate reality populated by odd, often hostile creatures. In Spring Breakers, currently playing in Springfield at AMC’s Parkway 8, four young college girls wish for […]
Posted inOpinion
History by the book
Springfield has seen two Lincoln movies recently – Saving Lincoln, which retells the White House years from the perspective of his close friend and bodyguard and which the Abraham Lincoln Association screened on Feb. 11 at Abe World, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. That left moviegoers asking the question, Which one is worth seeing? I’m more […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Squad a pretender in the gangster genre
While director Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad lets us know that it’s “inspired by a true story,” it becomes clear early on that it’s much more interested in the artifice of crime films rather than the hardboiled facts. To be sure, it’s a good-looking movie as the clothes, cars and locations all look of the post-WW […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Linings Cooper, Lawrence shine
Pat Jr. (Bradley Cooper) has a lot on his mind. His mother Delores (Jacki Weaver) has just sprung him from a mental institution after an eight-month stay. Seems, at home he had walked in on his wife Nikki (Brea Bee) and a co-worker taking a shower and nearly beat the guy to death. Well, can […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Acts of kindness buoy a harrowing Impossible
Director Juan Antonio Bayona puts us through the wringer with The Impossible, a harrowing film recounting one family’s improbable survival of the 2004 tsunami that occurred in the Indian Ocean. Employing cutting-edge special effects and an unflinching approach toward recreating the severity of the disaster which claimed an estimated 230,000 lives and displaced 1.7 million […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Land doesn’t fulfill promise
While there’s never any doubt that Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land was made with the best of intentions, something goes slightly awry in the execution of this environmental awareness movie. Working from a screenplay by Matt Damon and John Krasinski (The Office), which was based on a story by Dave Eggers, the film sets out […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cruise at home in Reacher
In light of recent events, it’s rather difficult watching the opening of Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher as a sniper picks off five innocent victims from a distance. I wouldn’t say the scene is done in a casual or callous way. At least until our collective sense of denial kicks in or memory fades, the lens […]
