Four Brothers Movie Review

Maybe it’s my love of westerns that made me fall so hard for John Singleton’s Four Brothers, his 2005 Detroit-set revenge film and his best work since Boyz N the Hood. I didn’t realize it then, or even the second time I watched it, that it’s essentially a modern urban western. The lawlessness of the open land and small towns has been replaced by the gutted and run down Motor City. Instead of some evil landowner there’s a crime boss (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor early in his Hollywood career and long before his star turn in 12 Years a Slave). Replacing the heroic gunslinger is a criminal and his three brothers, in town for their mother Evelyn’s (Fionnula Flanagan) funeral and to exact revenge for her murder in what appears to be a convenience store robbery. Many of the western tropes are there. There are gunfights. There are shots establishing the landscape, in this cast derelict buildings and snow-swept (as opposed to wind) open spaces of frozen lakes.

Inside Llewyn Davis Movie Review

The Coen brothers love failures. They love characters who just hopelessly fail at what they do. Any great literary character has to have some flaw. Flaws make us human. The Greeks understood that. The most memorable Coen Brothers protagonists are defined by flaws and made human by the occasional glimmer of having it together. Mostly their heroes are lucky to get out alive. Their latest creation, Llewyn Davis, embodies elements we’ve seen before in their films. He’s going through a Job-like test a la Larry Gopnik. He’s Tom Regan without the wits and strokes of luck. He’s Jeff Lebowski without a bed of his own. He’s Everett McGill without a plan. He’s Barton Fink without the success. He’s all of this, but still entirely original.

Country Strong Movie Review: Country Strong, Movie Weak

There is simply so much wrong with Shana Feste’s Country Strong, it’s really hard to know where to begin. It wants so hard to be the next Tender Mercies but completely lacks the story, the heart, the writing, the directing, the central lead performance and the earned trust of the audience. This is a movie that has absolutely no shame about exploiting the character of a child with cancer to stage one last moment of hope and reconciliation between the protagonist and her husband. It is the mark of a weak director who needs to rely on such easy bait to win audience sympathy. I wonder if Feste has any experience whatsoever with even witnessing, let alone being intimate with, alcoholism. I ask myself because here is a screenplay that doesn’t seem to have a clue about addiction and the ways it insidiously manifests itself and slowly tears apart everyone around the afflicted person.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays country music star Kelly Canter. When we meet her she’s in a rehab clinic getting very friendly with an up-and-coming country music songwriter named Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund). When her husband and manager James (Tim McGraw) shows up to collect her (early) from rehab, she says that Beau is her sponsor. James doesn’t hesitate to distrust Beau, and with good reason, because it turns out she’s been having an affair with him.

TRON: Legacy Movie Review

I’m not really sure there were legions of fans or even the box office pedigree from TRON to warrant a sequel nearly 30 years later, but since the Hollywood studios have all but run out of ideas, Disney went ahead and made one. TRON: Legacy picks up several years after the conclusion of the original and then leaps many years into the future to bring us to the present. It also follows thematically from the first film’s warning (more quaint than foreboding) about the impending computer age.

TRON warned of the potential dangers of machines creeping more and more, ever so insidiously into our lives, depicting the consequences of a megalomaniac giving rise to a computer system that could eventually take over.  Legacy follows in a grand tradition of cinema depicting man vs. machine conflicts from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Matrix in upping the ante from a human villain operating a computer system for nefarious purposes to artificial intelligence attempting to create a more perfect world at the expense of their human designers.