Tag: movies

• Living In Dystopia

  I’m a sucker for dystopian films. I’m still not sure exactly what draws me to this kind of story. Maybe it’s because of the infinite re-viewings of the Back to the Future trilogy, specifically Part II, which focused on people seeing hellish versions of their past or future and fighting to fix them. Perhaps it’s because…

  Nov 16, 2012

  # America, Back to the Future, Children of Men, dystopia, film, George Orwell, I Robot, Lexicon Valley, movies, politics, V for Vendetta

• Wild Strawberries and a poem

  I recently watched Ingmar Bergman’s achingly doleful Wild Strawberries, and one particular part stood out: the poem read by Isak Borg, the lonely old professor, when asked to resolve a lunchtime debate over the existence of God. After some Internet research, I learned the poem is an 1819 Swedish hymn by Josef Olaf Wallin called “Where is…

  Sep 18, 2012

  # Criterion Collection, film, God, Ingmar Bergman, Josef Olaf Wallin, movies, Sweden, Wild Strawberries

• Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop

  Watching Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop made me realize something I’ve suspected for a long time: I don’t ever want to be famous. There’s a scene in this documentary about the “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television” stage tour Conan created immediately after his inauspicious exit from The Tonight Show in 2010 where Conan does a meet-and-greet after…

  Feb 19, 2012

  # celebrity, Conan O’Brien, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, documentary, film, movies, review, television, Whitney Houston

• Favorite Films of 2011

  I saw a number of fine films in 2011. Here, I talk about the great ones and what I thank them for. Beginners, for Christopher Plummer’s exuberance as a recently-out elderly gay man; for Ewan McGregor’s hopeful melancholia as his perpetual bachelor son, and for this exchange between them: “HAL: Well, let’s say that since…

  Jan 8, 2012

  # Attack the Block, Beginners, best of, film, lists, Marcy May Martha Marlene, Meek’s Cutoff, Midnight in Paris, movies, review, The Artist, The Muppets, The Tree of Life, Win Win, X:Men: First Class

• 7 Beautiful Movie Music Moments

  Sometimes we as moviegoers have to let movies affect us in ways we cannot explain or control. One of those ways is through music. Whether it is an epic orchestral theme or a lone piano suite, music in the movies can make the difference in how I respond to the story. Listening to a CD…

  Dec 4, 2011

  # Alan Silvestri, Cast Away, film, Glen Hansard, Howard Shore, lists, Lord of the Rings, movies, music, Once, Philip Glass, Remember the Titans, The Truman Show, Trevor Rabin, WALL-E

• A Different Look at ‘Back to the Future’

  For a college class in winter 2008-09, we had to make a “zine” on a topic of our choice. Mine was called The Movies: Take Two. It aimed to “take a different look” at all things movie-related using crowd-sourced haikus, six-word summaries, and some of my own comparative film analyses to cast some of my…

  Nov 7, 2011

  # Back to the Future, Christopher Lloyd, DeLorean, Doc Brown, film, Marty McFly, Michael J. Fox, movies

• Why ‘Back To The Future’ Still Rules

  To celebrate Back to the Future Week, I’m posting a story I wrote for my school paper in 2008 about my hopeless devotion to the time-bending trilogy. If I were asked to name what I think are the greatest films of all time, I might throw out a few high-brow titles like Rear Window or Casablanca or…

  Nov 7, 2011

  # Back to the Future, Christopher Lloyd, DeLorean, Doc Brown, film, Marty McFly, Michael J. Fox, movies, review

• Love and Illusion in ‘Midnight In Paris’ and ‘Me And Orson Welles’

  Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality / Open your eyes / Look up to the skies / And see.—“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen A few summers ago I was in Guatemala with my sister, staying with an older married couple near the…

  Jun 26, 2011

  # film, Me and Orson Welles, Midnight in Paris, movies, Owen Wilson, Paris, Rachel McAdams, review, Richard Linklater, theater, Woody Allen, Zac Efron

• There’s No Felling This Forrest

  Can’t say that I’m a big fan of the results of this new poll from The Telegraph, in which voters named Forrest Gump the greatest movie character of all time, with James Bond, Scarlett O’Hara, Hannibal Lecter, and Indiana Jones filling out the top five. While I know some lists are entirely unserious affairs, the…

  Mar 23, 2011

  # film, Forrest Gump, Gone With The Wind, Indiana Jones, James Bond, movies

• The Warmth Of The Snow

  Living in a warm climate during the Christmas season is good and bad. On one hand, you can walk around in shorts and a t-shirt while your northern friends brave harsh winds and icy roads just to get to their mailbox. But on the other hand, it’s just not Christmas without the cold. As a…

  Mar 13, 2011

  # Advent, Christmas, God, It’s A Wonderful Life, life, movies, religion, winter

• Best Films of 2010

  Toy Story 3How great was the epic Western opening sequence? (It was actually a recreation of the original film’s opener.) I couldn’t stop smiling throughout this movie. It does a remarkable job of marrying old characters with new challenges. But the reason this is the best of the year is its ending. Andy decides to…

  Dec 28, 2010

  # best of, Black Swan, film, Inception, lists, movies, review, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit

• The Cove

  Save the Whales is so last century. Dolphins, according to the new Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove, are what really need saving now. The film profiles Ric O’Barry, a former dolphin trainer who captured and trained the dolphins for the 1960s show Flipper. It was during that time when O’Barry realized the inherent cruelty of…

  Mar 16, 2010

  # dolphins, film, Japan, movies, NCC Chronicle, review, The Cove

• Best Films of the 2000s

  The Lives of Others (2006) – A German film about a surveillance expert who spies on a playwright in Communist Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Lives of Others won the Best Foreign film at the Oscars and for good reason. Unbearably suspenseful and surprisingly moving, The Lives of Others shows that…

  Dec 30, 2009

  # best of, Children of Men, film, High Fidelity, In America, lists, Memento, movies, Once, review, The Lives of Others, Unbreakable, WALL-E, Zodiac

• Disney, Pixar, And The Golden Age of Animation

  Published in the North Central Chronicle in September 2009. Everyone has a favorite animated movie. I’m a Toy Story man myself. But no matter which film you prefer, it’s clear that our generation—the Millennials, born between 1983 and 2000—has been the most spoiled in history in terms of the animated films we’ve grown up watching.…

  Sep 17, 2009

  # animation, Disney, film, movies, NCC Chronicle, Pixar, Toy Story

• You Should See ‘Up’ Right Now

  Yeah, it’s good. Great, even. It’ll be another hit for Pixar, and deservedly so. I thought making a movie about a rat in a kitchen would be a tough sell, but alas, they made Ratatouille. Then came a largely dialogue-less movie about a robot stuck on a trash-riddled Earth in the future. Wall-E was the…

  May 31, 2009

  # film, movies, Pixar, Up

• Twilight Bites: How Dazzling Vampires Distort Masculinity

  Published in the North Central Chronicle on April 24, 2009. Let’s pretend I’m a teenage girl and that you’re my best friend. I’ve just told you about this guy I started dating. He’s perfect in every way, I say. He stares at me while I sleep, he alienates me from my friends and, among other…

  Apr 24, 2009

  # Bella Swan, Edward Cullen, film, masculinity, movies, NCC Chronicle, review, Twilight

• Phoebe In Wonderland

  Being a kid today has got to be tough. Being a kid with an insatiable creative appetite and a slight case of obsessive compulsive disorder has got to be even tougher. That’s what Phoebe (played by 11-year-old Elle Fanning, Dakota’s younger sister) has to go through in Phoebe in Wonderland, the newest film from director…

  Apr 10, 2009

  # Elle Fanning, film, movies, Phoebe in Wonderland, review

• And The Oscar Goes To…

  …the most predictable Oscars ever. Every year it seems like the suspense is sucked out of the actual awards ceremony with the months of speculation and campaigning and Oscar ballots. This year, sadly, was even more predicable than previous ones because of the incessant and overrated Slumdog Millionaire cleaned house just as every one predicted…

  Feb 22, 2009

  # film, movies, Oscars