film criticism by maryann johanson | handcrafted since 1997
Ballerina turned whore-spy? This is like a cheap porn scenario, and the Hollywood gloss makes it worse. Risible yet tedious, yet another movie by men that thinks it’s critiquing misogyny yet is indistinguishable from it.
Lots of movies to chose from, but most are playing on only a very few screens.
Smart, breezy spy action, with an of-the-moment vibe that takes it post-post-9/11 and into the Wikileaks era of global politics.
Oh yeah, I’m late with this. I carefully gather them all year long and then I never get around to posting them. So here they are at long last. And for 2011, I’m just gonna post ’em as they come in. So there.
Of all the washed-up washed-out over-the-hill too-old-for-this-shit action-hero movies we’ve had thrown at us this year — The A-Team, The Losers, The Expendables — Red is by far the most amusing, the most clever, the most tongue-in-cheek, the most fun (and I say that as someone who mostly liked those other movies).
James Franco’s elucidation of Allen Ginsberg is soaring in its warmth and sincerity. The words are (mostly) the writer’s, but the vitality and the passion are all Franco’s: he makes the poet breathe for us today in a way that feels entirely modern and relevant.
