AN EX-HITMAN [Keanu Reeves] comes out of retirement to track down the gangsters that took everything from him. With New York City as its bullet-riddled playground, John Wick is a fresh and stylized take on the assassin genre. Here is another instalment of John Wick’s many legendary feats.
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 concerns a carefully and well-constructed life as it rapidly deconstructs in real time.
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, an emo environmentalist with a too-voguish commitment to veganism and animal rights, is widely denounced, as is the film’s non-biblical (if not anti-biblical) theme – that human sin is against Mother Earth, not God, and that redemption must be found through earth-friendly living.
I HAVE A RULE that states I don’t write about sports or movie stars, but today I’m breaking that rule. It’s my website, so it’s my rules (broken). Hollywood keeps sticking their loud faces into my life, over and over, so I’m stealing Jennifer Lawrence from them and putting her on my website, for whatever meagre benefits I can gain. A few hundred people are going to land here now, totally by accident, and when they do I’ll be waiting with a big sign that says A-ha! But don’t leave right away, because this is a post about Jennifer Lawrence. Or to be more specific, it’s a post about all the things Jennifer Lawrence and I have in common. Yeah, it’s Jennifer Lawrence with a BONUS.
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.
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 world will pipe.
For in our will there sticketh aye a nail,
To have an hoary head and a green tail.
Or to phrase it another way – as indeed it is phrased elsewhere in the poem – though there be snow on the chimney, there is fire down below.
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 exhumed from graves. In this case however the seizing and the devouring of human beings are crimes of a Christian character and constitute the explicit subjects of Jeff Barnaby’s first full-length feature, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, which at eighty-eight minutes — short by today’s standard — is an economical and engaging story.
LET US BEGIN by acknowledging the obvious, that the 2011 movie Crazy, Stupid, Love is light and pleasant, adult fare but hardly a work of depth or of high seriousness. Its architecture is thoroughly of a Shakespearean cast, in which a main plot is complemented by and interweaved with two sub-plots. A moment arrives when the characters and their dramatic trajectories, hitherto discrete, collide one with another to calamitous effect. Things fall to pieces, and from this seeming state of irreparable chaos order is reinstated. This narrative arc, from social order to disorder and back to order once again, with no lasting harm done, is the essence of Comedy.
Continue reading Crazy, Stupid, Love and the Comedy of Middle Aged Failure
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