Conspiracy theorists, start your engines. When early front-runner Zero Dark Thirty won but one Oscar on Sunday night, it marked quite a fall from grace. For most of awards season, it was the prohibitive favorite for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and most of the technical awards. Of course, we all know what happened.…
Earlier this week, The New Republic published a scathing and moralistic piece by Thomas Hackett about the Oscar-nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild. While he begrudgingly praises the film’s “excitement for the surprising places artful imagery and editing can take us,” he ends up making the rather inflammatory claim that the film is “patronizing and…
At various points during this awards season that culminates Sunday night at the Academy Awards, there have been three prohibitive favorites for the Best Picture Oscar. For most of the fall, prognosticators assumed Zero Dark Thirty would take home Oscar gold. After the controversy over that film’s depiction of torture reached a fever pitch and…
The question is not whether A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth film in which grizzled New York cop John McClane fails to acquiesce to the ending implicit in its title, is worth seeing. It’s not. It’s a terrible, terrible movie. The only question is where your mind will wander while the film fails…
When I told my friends I was going to see Top Gun during its brief 3D theatrical re-release (which ends this week), nobody was particularly impressed. When I mentioned that I had never seen it before, their eyes widened, and each put forth some variation of the same question: “How is that possible?” The film…
The mind behind the words of the White House’s most accomplished orator is leaving for Hollywood. Yesterday, news broke that Jon Favreau, who has been Obama’s lead speechwriter since the early Senate days, will leave the White House on March 1st and try his hand at screenwriting. File this one under “another one bites the…
It was either an ironic quirk of fate or a stroke of genius by the theater manager. As I waited in the dim lighting for Stand Up Guys to start, “Por Una Cabeza” was piped in over the theater’s sound system. It’s the song Al Pacino danced the tango to in that famous scene in…
Netflix is having a moment. On January 23, the home entertainment platform proudly announced an 8% increase in revenue in the last quarter of 2012. The next day, the company’s stock soared to a 43% increase, the largest single-day gain since the company went public more then a decade ago. All of a sudden, Netflix…
Reel Change 
You must be logged in to post a comment.