As the run-up to Academy Awards night enters its final week, I’ve noticed a particular amount of backlash for Slumdog Millionaire and especially The Curious Case of Benjamni Button. The Slumdog grumbling centers mostly on the usual handwringing over cultural appropriation – is it OK for a Western director to shoot and set his film [...]
At the screening of Milk I attended a number of people walked out during scenes in which Sean Penn and James Franco were kissing. I had to wonder whether these folks thought they were going to see a film about beverage consumption. Did they not know this was a film about a gay man? On [...]
Slumdog Millionaire is unusual in that it’s a fairytale built on a core of the real misery and struggle that exists in cities like Mumbai. Then again, maybe it’s not so unusual – the Grimm’s fairtytales had some extremely disturbing elements and at a time before urban sprawl and centralized law and order staying out [...]
Rachel Getting Married is a film that, by description, promises studio indie cliché by the boatload. Big name director (Jonathan Demme) and a big star (Anne Hatahway) looking to show her Oscar chops in a drama set around a big dysfunctional family gathering. Plus, the star plays an obnoxious off-putting sourpuss. Cue Noah Baumbach’s Margot [...]
Here is the third and final installment of the Best Movies of 1988. You can see Part One here and Part Two here. 11) The Unbearable Lightness of Being Underrated auteur Philip Kaufman had the bad luck of being a great 70s style American director in the 1980s. After his magnificent adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s [...]
The Twitters