From My Collection: Leaving Las Vegas Movie Review

To understand a little about the kind of person I was in high school, I probably need only tell you that a movie I and my friends wanted to see was Leaving Las Vegas, Mike Figgis’s film about an alcoholic who decides to drink himself to death and strikes up an odd relationship with a prostitute. And believe me when I tell you it had nothing to do with seeing Elisabeth Shue’s (star of childhood favorite Adventures in Babysitting) breasts. A friend and I went to see it because it had challenging subject matter, because it was a reprieve from the usual populist fare. If I was like that at 17, then imagine how my taste runs today.

The Fitzgerald Family Christmas Movie Review

Every family has troubles and internal drama. It’s very easy to spot it in other families, but to turn the lens inward and examine your own circumstances is difficult. We have a tendency to always think of ourselves as reasonable despite evidence to the contrary. Harder still is to turn a literal lens onto a family’s problems and conflicts and shape it from paper to screen into a compelling story that people might learn something from. Edward Burns has been trying to do that since his independent filmmaking career began auspiciously more than fifteen years ago during the American renaissance (which turned out to be the last dying gap) of indie films.