Summer of Sam Movie Review

I can’t say with any certainty what it was like to live through the summer of 1977 in New York City because I wasn’t born yet, but Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam tries to capture it, or at least some stylized and possibly fantasy version of it. It was one of the hottest summers ever in the city with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees, leading to brown-outs and an eventual blackout. There was a serial killer on the prowl, gunning people down as they sat in their cars at night. Lee’s movie makes it seem like all the killings happened during those few months, but in reality they started a year earlier and were well spread out chronologically with only a couple of the shootings occurring that summer, although Lee includes recreations of nearly all of them scattered throughout the film.

The Grand Budapest Hotel Movie Review

I’ve just written about Rushmore and touched on the great stylistic difference between Wes Anderson’s earliest films and the techniques he uses in his latest. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a great example of how Anderson’s stylized world, whimsical flights of fancy, and self-conscious artifice have grown and joined together to blend into a harmonious vision.

I was a true Anderson enthusiast through The Royal Tenenbaums, but he lost me until Fantastic Mr. Fox, which struck me as the absolute perfect representation of what he has always tried to accomplish. The Grand Budapest Hotel has brought him back completely into my good graces and though it contains moments that are so previously Wes Anderson-y that it risks becoming a parody of his own style, it somehow reached me in surprising and new ways.

Midnight in Paris Movie Review: City of Lights After Dark

 “It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.” – Anatole Broyard

Is there no time as good as the present? Is nostalgia the exclusive purview of fools? How does remembering fondly grow out of proportion until it becomes reliving? Gil Pender is stuck in a rut, hamstrung by pervasive thoughts that Paris in the Roaring Twenties was the absolute pinnacle of living. Because Gil is a character in Woody Allen’s latest addition to his perennially expanding oeuvre, he is a writer (of successful, but empty Hollywood screenplays) working on his first novel and saddled with sarcastic wit, passion for the arts, and a healthy dose of self-doubt and insecurity.

Predators Movie Review: An Arnie Classic Defiled

Adrien Brody awakens to find himself in freefall, hurtling toward the earth at terminal velocity, desperately searching for a ripcord. His parachute opens quite late and he slams into the ground. Luckily he gets up virtually unscathed with no broken bones. Hopefully his career will turn out the same way after taking this part in Predators, the reboot (or sequel of sorts because reference is made to events in the original) of the 1987 cult favorite which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Shortly after landing he links up with several others in the same situation. They’re all left to discover what an American mercenary, an IDF soldier, a Mexican drug cartel enforcer, a doctor, a death row inmate, a Japanese Yakuza, a Sierra Leone guerilla, and a Russian Special Forces soldier all have in common. Well, one thing is that they all rather conveniently speak English. Phew! If they didn’t, the film would have been a hard sell on American audiences.