curated: ‘Saving Private Ryan’ with all the men edited out
Ahhh… This is quite relaxing.
Saving Private Ryan
The Water Diviner movie review: magic unrealism
When director Crowe sticks to historical adventure, his film is tense and exciting. But it lacks a sense of magic that it needs to make it fully engaging.
how movies fail girls and women (fans and filmmakers alike)
Girls and women love movies just as much as boys and men do. But it’s a love that gets thrown back in our faces by 95 percent of films.
question of the day: How much should the federal government censor American broadcast television?
Is it a moot point, since broadcast TV is clearly on its way out, or at least on its way to being much less culturally influential?
question of the day: What movies best honor the work and sacrifices of soldiers?
This can be a toughie, because matters of war are always laden with political and moral issues apart from the actual work soldiers do… and often do against their own principals.
question of the day: What movie would be the most horrifying one to adapt to a stage musical?
The other day I lamented the West End arrival next year of Ghost: The Musical. Today in the Telegraph there’s a review of the new stage version of Flashdance, and it ain’t pretty…
March 12: DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but you still haven’t given up the search for WMDs in Iraq. But you can have a multiplex-like experience at home with a collection of the right DVDs. And when someone asks you on Monday, “Hey, did you see Green Zone … more…
Flags of Our Fathers (review)
Half bitter and harsh, half propagandistic and hagiographic, this is the love child of ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and ‘Pearl Harbor,’ too sentimental to be intellectually satisfying but too tart to serve as melodrama.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (review)
And they don’t come much geekier or more touchstony than 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, not only damn near one of the funniest movies ever made but certainly one of the most quotable… at least for us endlessly self-referential types for whom all of life is but a never ceasing trail of opportunities to show off the ridiculous capability we have for retaining movie, computer, and science fiction trivia.
Gladiator (review)
Is Gladiator an action movie? Is it an historical drama? Is it a sweeping epic? Yes. Like The 13th Warrior, this is a thinking person’s action movie. Like Braveheart, this is a story of a brutal era told with stunning realism. Like Terminator 2, this is a violent movie that indicts our appetite for violence. Like The Matrix, this thrills on both a visceral and cerebral level.
