Celeste and Jesse Forever

  Celeste and Jesse Forever is love, L.A. style.  Written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, the characters are a little more adult than the ones we saw in 500 Days of Summer and it shows.  The title characters have been separated for almost a year but haven’t quite moved on yet…until one of them (in this case […]

Life of Pi

  Wow! It won’t win Best Picture, but politics aside, if the Oscar is supposed to go to the film that is most likely to leave the longest legacy or make the best overall impression (acting be damned, said by an actor no less!) than Life of Pi is that film this year.  And as ‘wrong’ as […]

C.M. Punk – Best in the World

  I normally save my annual wrestling column for a little later into ‘WrestleMania season’, but since there’s a decent chance that the most impressive WWE Title reign of the past 25 years is coming to an end this Sunday at the Royal Rumble, the time is right to post a review about the reigning […]

Red Hook Summer

  Between Sundance starting and MLK weekend, it feels like the right time to take an Oscar break and talk about Spike’s last film.  Red Hook Summer falls in line with most of Spike’s later work: there’s two interesting stories here, the main one is about a kid from Atlanta sent up to Red Hook (Brooklyn) […]

Argo

  Frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar now?  Well, definitely not for Best Director (argument for another day).  Anyway, Ben Affleck’s latest (and best) effort has all the ingredients: ‘based on a true story’, top notch supporting cast, a little bit of Hollywood making fun of itself…all the pieces are there. The story itself is […]

Beasts of the Southern Wild

  I doubt this will win Best Picture, but the case can be made Beasts of the Southern Wild is symbolic of what this year’s field of nominees represents: quirky, personal, ‘small’ films, with at least one great performance. Set deep in the Bayou, Beasts is a parable/fable narrated to us by ‘Hushpuppy’ (Best Actress nominee Quvenzhane Wallis), a […]

Moonrise Kingdom

  A Wes Anderson film.  A ‘filmmaker’s film’.  A ‘geek film’.  I open with a fair warning because I know all of you won’t dig Moonrise Kingdom.  You probably know going in if it’s the type of film you would like or not. The story is another ‘misfits in love’ story (popular this year it seems). […]

Silver Linings Playbook

  Ending the week with another potential ‘award film’.  Silver Linings Playbook is a love story, but where are two main characters are extremely effed up to say the least.  The guy (played by Bradley Cooper) is coming out of a stint in an institution after a violent end to his marriage. The girl (yet another great feather […]

Zero Dark Thirty

Happy New Year first of all!  Who’s down to start the year with a string of reviews of (mostly) Oscar caliber movies?  Me too!  Let’s start with one of the frontrunners… Zero Dark Thirty is the dramatized version of the manhunt and eventual capture of Osama bin Laden.  Directed by Kathryn Bigelow off of a script […]