Tag: review
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Stranger Than Fiction
Originally published in the North Central Chronicle on January 18, 2009, as part of a series called “Chad Picks Classic Flicks.” An artist may not set out to create something that changes the world, but he just might do it by mistake. Marc Forster’s 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction is a movie about fate—or “the…
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Happy-Go-Millionaire
Hallelujah! It’s Oscar season! I guess seeing Rachel Getting Married was technically my first dive into this year’s plethora of Oscar bait, but tonight I dove down further by seeing Happy-Go-Lucky and Slumdog Millionaire, two small films that are getting a lot of buzz and landing on some critics’ Best of 2008 lists. Naturally, I…
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The Sting
Originally published in the North Central Chronicle in October 2008 as part of a series called “Chad Picks Classic Flicks.” Welcome back to “Chad Picks Classic Flicks.” I was catching up on more recent films over the summer but I’m excited to start a new year of discovering the new in films of old. This…
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Canopy Glow by Anathallo
One of my favorite albums of the year: Over the last eight years they have been making music together, Anathallo’s sound has evolved slowly and subtly. Starting in 2001 with Luminous Luminescence in the Atlas Position and continuing with A Holiday at the Sea two years later, the band had adopted an almost avant garde…
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The War by Ken Burns
I’m still working my way through it, but I’ve already come to appreciate Ken Burns’ seven-part 2007 miniseries The War. Burns explains in the making-of feature that he wanted to show the war not through historians but through average citizens, men and women and children from every corner of the country who endured the front…
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Quantum of Solace
Not as good as Casino Royale. It was still quite enjoyable, though. I like the director Marc Forster’s style. Previously he directed Stranger Than Fiction, Finding Neverland, and Monster’s Ball. He’s got quite the range. I find that Roger Ebert’s criticism of the film is accurate, though I don’t hate it as much as he…
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The Things They Carried
“A true war story is never moral,” writes Tim O’Brien in his book The Things They Carried. Indeed, if there ever was a hard lesson learned by the United States, its citizens and, most importantly, the soldiers during the Vietnam War, it was that war was without morals, no matter how Hollywood depicted it. The stories…
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Iron Man
I think us moviegoers have caught on to the whole Superhero Movie thing. We’ve learned that comic book superheroes are born out of a freak radioactive experiment gone wrong, or out of childhood anger, yadda yadda yadda. We know that evil villains will eventually be outsmarted and killed due to excessive monologuing. We’ve caught on…
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Macho, Macho Men: Vulnerability in ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘The Bourne Identity’
Originally published in the North Central Chronicle on April 25, 2008. John McClane, Rambo, the Terminator. They are the American Action Hero: muscular, terse, a killing machine. They favor spouting clever catchphrases and blowing stuff up over expressing emotion. To them, women are hors d’oeuvres best enjoyed while they serve cold dishes of revenge to…