Flirting with Disaster Movie Review

One of the most criminally undervalued comedies of the 90s was written and directed by a man was an Oscar nominee this year for the critically acclaimed The Fighter. But back in 1996 he made a modest comedy, his follow-up to the indie hit Spanking the Monkey. Sporting a great cast and some fantastic comedy writing (combining situational comedy with great one-liners), Flirting with Disaster deserves a lot more notice than it has gotten over the years.

Milk Movie Review

First published on American Madness on 20 December 2008.

Republished here with a typo correction.

Director Gus Van Sant has taken a break from his often inaccessible forays into (almost) experimental film to make Milk, a very typical Hollywood biopic about Harvey Milk, the nation’s first openly gay man to win major elected office and then assassinated shortly thereafter. I don’t use ‘typical’ pejoratively, rather as an observation of how Van Sant’s film follows most of the conventions of the genre and as a contrast to his other recent work. Van Sant also directed Good Will Hunting – a formulaic Hollywood film that I love.

True Grit Movie Review: Jeff Bridges Dons the Eye Patch for an Iconic Role

Proverbs 28:1 tells us “The wicked flee where none pursueth.” So it is with the coward Tom Chaney, the wanted outlaw in Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Charles Portis’s True Grit. Their title card at the beginning of the film leaves out the second part of that proverb: “But the righteous are bold as a lion.” So it is with Mattie Ross, the 14 year old girl who hires Marshal Rooster Cogburn to take her on an expedition into Indian country to capture the man who shot and killed her father. Although Mattie seeks out Cogburn because she heard he’s a man with “true grit,” the story reveals that in fact she is the one with that attribute.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Movie Review

The thing that has made Wall Street a cult classic was Gordon Gekko. Here was a villainwhose thirst for more money kew no bounds, not so much because he wanted more, but because he liked the thrill of the chase. An entire generation of Wall Street has pathetically modeled itself on his balls to the wall attitude toward finance. To take that character and water him down, give him pathos, provide him a reason to repent is not to capture the spirit of the original film, but to capture a wider audience and bigger box office return.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Woody Allen Movie Review

It’s become a matter of routine clockwork that around this time every year the new film from Woody Allen finds its way to cinema screens around the United States. Usually his films open earlier in Europe, as was the case with his latest, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, his fourth London-based film.

As much as I have liked some of Allen’s recent films, none of them have made as indelible an impression on my mind as his earlier classics. I’m relieved and satisfied to accept that he seems to have permanently left behind the sad gimmicks that marred his work in the first half of the last decade: hysterical blindness; hypnosis; parallel stories, to name a few.