Cinema, Literature, Theater, Music, Art.

In The Force Awakens a black man is tasered twice, drinks putrid water from a trough alongside an animal resembling a pig, and - in his own words - states that he used to work in sanitation. OK. Let's let those details slide. Call me politically correct. A Cambridge lefty. I can take it. By the way, that black man is the film's male lead. Does that make everything okay? By now everyone pretty much agrees that there are no major surprises, aesthetically or narratively, in The Force Awakens. OK, maybe the aerial dogfights have a few more twists and turns than last time, and what happens to Han Solo is, well, something of a surprise (though we all saw it coming). But everything from the film's color palette to its chase-scene structure (where's the map? C'mon people!) smacks of deja vu all over again. Of course, it's supposed to. You don't make a billion dollars on a $350 million investment (that's some cabbage right there, folks!) innovating . You ma...

From El Topo (1970). Alejandro Jodorowsky (right). The idea of a western as something more than a good guy (white hat) / bad guy (black hat) showdown had been pioneered by John Ford as far back as Stagecoach (1939), but few if any - filmmakers can turn a genre piece into a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Infused with iconic and surreal imagery, El Topo is considered the grandaddy of midnight cult movies, and deservedly so. Jodorowsky has said his goal with regard to cinema is to re-create the experience of taking LSD, without taking the hallucinogenic. He wants to re-write the book on how humans perceive life and themselves. Highly ambitious, his films shatter every preconceived notion we have about what cinema is supposed to be.  Imagine Luis Bunuel, Quentin Tarantino, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez rolled into one and you'd probably get Alejandro Jodorowsky. He has called himself the "father of the midnight movie" and he's probably right. Throughout his c...

Great poster! Beautiful concept. The image tells us everything we'd want to know about the film. Especially gutsy is the decision to exclude Jesse Eisenberg's and Jason Segel's faces.  It's called a  two-hander . In the theatre it connotes a play with only two actors. hink  Driving Miss Daisy  or most plays by Samuel Beckett. In  The End of the Tour , Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg and director James Ponsoldt take the two hander into movie land, albeit with a supporting cast (including a hilarious comedic acting turn courtesy of Joan Cusack) and make it into a genuine, moving, funny, and heart-wrenching bit of cinema.  The celebrity writer and his admirer. Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel.  We may never know who David Foster Wallace really was. Already his estate is disowning this film - but the truth about that is also  up for grabs. All we have is the film, exhibit A (if you will), and what we read about it, along with Mr. Wallace'...

It's a genre. The literary film. Note the title's font, a clear reference to Philip Roth. It's a genre. You've seen the type before. The literary film. Stories about writers, their books, their lives, loves, egos, successes, and failures. Put a young, ambitious, self-absorbed writer in New York City, make him Jewish, give him a mentor and a string of girlfriends past and present, and call him Philip. Now add a title font that strongly resembles the fonts used on the covers of Philip Roth's books and you've got Alex Ross Perry's  Listen Up Philip.  Using two key techniques - a narrator's voice over (performed by Eric Bogosian) and long, dialogue-driven scenes filmed hand held in close ups - Perry's film is, like Jason Shwartzman's character, Philip Lewis Friedman, both attractive and repelling.  Listen Up Philip  attempts - and to some degree - succeeds in keeping us interested in the life of a lousy, heartless, but talented egoist.  Phil...

Locke's poster suggests speed. In fact, the BMW Locke drives down Britain's M6 motorway never goes above 60 mph. The movements here are all inside Locke's mind. Wonderful. Watching Locke you get the feeling the film was written and directed by a twenty five year old upstart. A kid , really, more interested in innovation than emotion. I looked up the writer/director. He is 56 year old Steven Knight, a Brit, and with a string of screenwriting credits behind him. So...that was my first misconception. The second one actually took place before I saw the film. I had read that the entire film took place inside a moving car, the camera trained on Mr. Hardy, and that was pretty much it. How, I wondered, could this possibly be anything more than an interesting, meandering, but ultimately failed experiment? As I say, that was my second misconception. The landscape of Tom Hardy's face in Locke registers a gamut of feelings. It's as much of a canvas as the surrounding l...

Criterion's poster for the re-relase of Ray's Apu Trilogy. If you go, see them in the order they were made, preferably in one day. Sure, it's a marathon, but worth every minute. For Boston folks, the Kendall Square Cinema has scheduled them to play back to back, with a 45 minute break between parts 2 and 3, just enough time for a sandwich and a beer at The Friendly Toast! “Never having seen a Satyajit Ray film is like never having seen the sun or the moon.”  —AKIRA KUROSAWA Criterion's restored 4K theatrical re-release of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy ranks among the top cinematic events of the year. The films are deeply human and tell a timeless, universal story in the simplest of ways. The degree of authenticity here might lead one to believe they're watching a type of ethnographic or anthropological documentary when, in fact, we are talking about a filmmaking style closer to the Italian neo-realists (I'm thinking specifically of DeSica's B...

Indominus Rex gets inside Jurassic World's aviary. Mouahahaah! I never thought I'd find myself telling you to see the biggest blockbuster on the planet in the summer of 2015, but - ironically - here I am telling you as much. More importantly, here is Steven Spielberg, guns a blazin'. By now the whiz kid's playbook has been co-opted, imitated, stolen, copied, and mimicked by just about everyone, but nothing beats the original. Working as executive producer, Spielberg's touch is evident throughout Jurassic World's " Wonder-kid-I'm-having-so-much-fun-Holy-crap-watch-out-for-that monster! " ride. That it's directed by someone else (whose name escapes me and I'm too lazy to look it up) is kind of secondary. This is a Steven Spielberg summer fantasia. Let's look at the evidence.  Old school Amblin' Entertainment logo indicating this is a project very close to Spielberg's heart? Check. The hero as lion tamer. Creepy opening...

In our real time amnesiac society, writing about The Interview today may be like arriving a little late to the party, but I have to say that, watching it last night with the Katherine and the kids, some notes are in order. For starters, don't be fooled. This is a family movie. Today's American 12 and 14 year olds are really adults disguised as children. They will see more on the interweb and talk more supposed "trash" at school than The Interview could possibly hope to do. Furthermore, if you are looking to suspend your disbelief because you seek realism, look somewhere else. The Interview shamelessly mocks itself and kids not only get that "it's only a movie", but this knowledge grants the filmmakers and audience license to ill. Satire, parody, and comedy, as we have seen recently in Paris, can really piss off individuals, splinter groups, clans, tribes, or nations. It would be too much to say the "offended" parties lead humorless lives. A...

Wild Tales Black. Very black. Hilarious. Once in a while a movie comes along that expresses the dark side of our wish fulfillment fantasies. If revenge is a plate best eaten cold then this flic is positively glacial. Yet the revenge fantasies played out in this sextet of short stories are infernal, burning, fire breathing, enraging, and ultimately immensely funny and vastly entertaining. Who among you has not wanted to stick it to the tow truck people who unjustly took your wheels? What newlywed - upon learning their recently betrothed had schtupped the co-worker - hasn't wanted to go postal? What if the man who caused your dad to commit suicide walked into your diner, didn't recognize you, and ordered eggs? Director Szifron adroitly peels back the thin veneer of civilized behavior to remind us that underneath we are still animals. His opening title sequence (following a pure genius opening scene involving a group of strangers flying on a jet who have - er...a um...friend in...