IN HIS LATEST FILM, “Locke,” British actor Tom Hardy plays the role of a construction manager. From this one may deduce not only a job description but an identity. Ivan Locke is a man who constructs, and Steven Knight’s screenplay… Read More ›
Film
Reviews and essays about movies, directors and actors.
If You Think Aronofsky’s Noah is Wacky, Try Reading the Original
ENTIRE NATIONS have now banned the film Noah. In the United States, Christians are unhappy with a Hollywood movie that substitutes, for the all-knowing and all-mighty LORD God Almighty, a distant, Pagan deity known vaguely as “the Creator.” Aronofsky’s Noah,… Read More ›
Who Exactly is Joining the Dallas Buyers Club?
MONTREAL DIRECTOR Jean-Marc Vallée first got my attention with the excellent French-language film C.R.A.Z.Y.. Now he’s taken his notoriety to a new level, with Dallas Buyers Club, written by Craig Borten and starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and Jared Leto.
Is Llewyn Davis a Loser?: The Coen Brothers’ Comedy of Error
THERE’S A STORY about Mike Dubue of the Hilotrons that goes something like the following: Mike plays a gig in Ottawa. An ex-girlfriend is in the audience, and she loves the show. So she takes out a scrap of paper… Read More ›
Bad Grandpa, Decent America
IN THE PROLOGUE to his ribald and comic tale, contained in Geoffrey Chaucer’s brilliant fourteenth-century poem Canterbury Tales, the Reeve observes of “olde men” that Till we be rotten, can we not be ripe. We hop away while that the… Read More ›
Reflections on Jeff Barnaby’s “Rhymes for Young Ghouls”
WE ARE INFORMED by the Oxford English Dictionary that the word “ghoul” derives from an Arabic root whose meaning is to seize. More specific, the term refers to an evil spirit said in Muslim countries to prey on human corpses… Read More ›
