If armies run on their stomachs, blogs run on their big fucking mouths. We’re no exception. But we’d like to think that, on a good day, we put all that hot air to good use when interrogating visiting dignitaries in advance of their triumphant arrival into the City Of Brotherly Love. We’ve never pretended to have all the answers but we do know all the right questions. And we’ve never settled for easy answers to hard questions. Sometimes feelings get hurt and sometimes new connections are made. Sometimes painful truths emerge and sometimes we actually learn something. And sometimes we […]
The Eyes Of Margaret Keane Are Always Upon You
BIG EYES (2014 Directed by Tim Burton; 105 minutes, U.S.) BY ZACHARY SHEVICH FILM CRITIC Big Eyes chronicles the strange but true story of the origin and rise to cultural prominence of Margaret Keane’s distinctive wide-eyed paintings and the ensuing controversy about their authorship that pitted Margaret against Walter Keane in a court of law vying for credit. Big Eyes is a stripped down, smaller budget film far more in the spirit of director Tim Burton’s early work than his more recent ventures into CGI-heavy, gaudily gothic, and, frankly, less interesting output. The film, starring Not Helena Bonham Carter […]
CINEMA: The Battle Of Nevermore
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (2014, directed by Peter Jackson, 144 minutes, New Zealand, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Like Frodo drunk with the power of The Ring, Peter Jackson could not resist his greedy plan of making a near eight hour version of The Hobbit. Now in its concluding chapter, The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies is an oddly affectless spectacle, emotionally inert, barren of thrills and in the end downright dull. The goodwill Jackson accrued from his wildly successful Lord Of The Rings trilogy has allowed The Hobbit‘s gaping flaws to be […]
CINEMA: Black Men Dream
#Blackmendream from Shikeith on Vimeo. NPR: Nine men sit turned away from the camera; their faces are never shown. Many are shirtless or naked. They answer questions like: When did you become a black man? Do you cry? How were you raised to deal with your emotions? This short film, called #Blackmendream, is the latest piece by Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist Shikeith Cathey. His work centers around the social, cultural and political misconceptions about black men in America, and the new film explores the emotional experience of black men, born out of those misconceptions. The men seem both vulnerable and powerful […]
CINEMA: The Reincarnation Of Alvy Singer
TOP FIVE (2014, directed by Chris Rock, 102 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There is a pretty wide swath of agreement that Chris Rock is one of the funniest guys alive, so why has it taken him so long to produce a decent movie vehicle for himself? Since stealing scenes from Eddie Murphy in 1987’s Beverly Hills Cop II, Rock been a fixture on movie screens but almost never in something worthy of his talents. (The one exception was his turn with Julie Delpy in 2012’s 2 Days in New York. And maybe Pootie-Tang.). Rock’s best vehicle […]
INCOMING: Authorized John Coltrane Documentary
COLTRANEFILM: Set against the social, political and cultural landscape of his times, the film will reveal the passions and demons that shaped Coltrane’s life, and explore why his music transcends the barriers of race, religion and age as it continues to inspire listeners around the world decades after his death. Utilizing never-before-seen Coltrane family home movies and audio recordings along with rare film and television appearances, Coltrane’s incredible story will be told by the people who know him best: his family, the musicians that worked with him, and the cultural icons who continue to draw inspiration from his fearless […]
CINEMA: The Fox In The Madhouse
FOXCATCHER (2014, directed by Bennett Miller, 130 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK It’s hard to live in the state of Delaware and not say the name “DuPont” every day or two. Highways, hospitals, chemical plants and state parks all carry the name. In fact, the DuPonts own their home state in a way that few old money families can claim. Residents of Delaware have made peace living in the shadow of these modern day Dukes and Duchesses but there was something unnerving to discover in 1986 that the DuPont name had been affixed to homicide. The news broke that […]
RIP: Mike Nichols, Creator Of Much Of The Greatest Cinema, Theater & Comedy Of The 20th Century
NEW YORK TIMES: Mike Nichols, one of America’s most celebrated directors, whose long, protean résumé of critic- and crowd-pleasing work earned him adulation both on Broadway and in Hollywood, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 83. Dryly urbane, Mr. Nichols had a gift for communicating with actors and a keen comic timing, which he honed early in his career as half of the popular sketch-comedy team Nichols and May. An immigrant whose work was marked by trenchant perceptions of American culture, he achieved — in films like “The Graduate,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Carnal Knowledge” and […]
CINEMA: Black Hole Son
INTERSTELLAR (2014, directed Christopher Nolan, 169 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC No hyperbole has been spared on the arrival of writer/director Christopher Nolan’s new sci-fi epic Interstellar. Like all of Nolan’s recent films, Interstellar triggers an intimidating sense of immense scale, and once again Nolan has delivered a film whose captivating performances and clever design are offset by hose-blasts of sentimentality, self-important bloat and a disagreeable undercurrent of Ayn Rand-ian self-pity. Plus, wise-cracking robots! The dystopic near-future America of the film’s opening is certainly thought-provoking. From the vantage point of the Cooper family’s rural farm we see a […]
CINEMA: Interstellar Overdrive
Illustration by CHRIS B. MURRAY NEW YORKER: Interstellar, an outer-space survivalist epic created by the director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. Nolan’s 2010 movie, “Inception,” offered layers of dreaming consciousness, each outfitted with its own style of action. The film was stunning but meaningless—a postmodern machine, with many moving parts, dedicated to its own workings and little else. In “Interstellar,” however, Nolan goes for a master narrative. Like so many recent […]
CINEMA: Night Moves
NIGHTCRAWLER (2014, directed by Dan Gilroy, 117 minutes, U.S.) THE GUEST (2014, directed by Adam Wingard, 99 minutes, U.S.) BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP (2014, directed by Rowan Joffe, 92 minutes, U.K.) HORNS (2013, directed by Alexandre Aja, 120 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A new financial reality has hit Hollywood as the range of films they once made has seemingly tightened. Of course we know they’re funding gargantuan super hero films and CGI-driven blockbusters but further down the budget ladder are modest action films with middle-aged stars, relatively inexpensive youth comedies and low budget horror films. […]
CINEMA: Wings Of Desire
BIRDMAN (OR THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE (2014, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, 119 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Birdman would appear to be the most acclaimed film of the year and it is easy to be swept up as its backstage drama takes flight. This sort of behind-the-curtains look at the world of theater has a long history in the world of small scale art films but director Alejando González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) juices up the precedings with a modern blockbuster dynamism and creates a film that is unlike much else we’ve seen in modern […]
CINEMA: Even Better Than The Real Thing
Art And Craft, which opens at the Ritz At The Bourse on tomorrow, follows the monkeyshines of eccentric self-described “philanthropist” and “art collector” Mark Landis, who donates famous works from his collection to museums around the country that could never afford to purchase them. Unbeknownst to the museums is the fact that all the works are actually forgeries — forgeries Landis created with his own two hands. In fact, Landis is considered the most prolific art forger of all time. Eventually Matthew Leininger, then a staffer at the Cincinnati Museum Of Art, discovers the ruse and begins tracking Landis […]