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Tag: film

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Spoof Vs. Spy
June 12, 2015
Summer 2015’s first big blockbuster comedy, Spy, may traffic in elaborate onscreen subterfuge, but it’s little more than the latest variation on a baby-simple, well-worn Hollywood formula.The movie’s admittedly energetic and amusing aim is to lampoon and critique the ...

The Fantastic Four Under Fire
May 29, 2015
Only in America can the skin color of someone who spends much of his waking life on fire supply the basis for a spirited pop-culture controversy. That’s the grim lesson of the media run-up to the latest in the long line of lumbering comics franchises’ superhero cash-cows ...

Nights of the Living Dread
May 01, 2015
This week, the luridly misleading media coverage of the Baltimore uprisings called to mind a fittingly grim narrative template from the entertainment world: shlocky action-horror fare. The strange alchemy by which reportage of Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of six ...

An American Marriage, Revisited
April 24, 2015
Limited Partnership, a new documentary about one of the nation’s first gay couples to be lawfully married, begins with a scene you might find in a legal thriller: an establishing shot of gray-slate courthouse columns gives way to a scrum of reporters positioned nearby. ...

Propaganda, Power, and Porn in Fifty Shades
February 17, 2015
I may get kicked off the Internet for saying this. But, when you look at it from the right angle, the Fifty Shades of Grey movie is a feminist victory. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, the idea of “porn for women” was a huge and often painful feminist debate. Porn was said ...

The True Cost of “Hollywood South”
February 13, 2015
It only took Louisiana eleven years and $1 billion to buy the title it’s always wanted—“Hollywood South,” the movie-making capital of the world. In 2013, it surpassed the film industry’s old standbys, California and Canada, by having eighteen major-studio releases shot ...

The Well-Trod Path: Nick Kristof at Home
February 12, 2015
Having liberated the “better half” of the developing world from gender-based oppression and poverty, the New York Times’s fave do-gooder Nicholas Kristof and his trusty investment-banker sidekick Sheryl WuDunn have set their sights closer to home. Folks on the war-torn ...

American Sniper and the Trope of the Sheepdog
January 26, 2015
The invasion of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands—perhaps even a million—people losing their lives. How can one attempt to justify so much killing? Enter Clint Eastwood’s new film American Sniper. Early in the movie, Chris Kyle’s father breaks life down for his ...

Wes Anderson’s Class Acts
January 20, 2015
I don’t know a single person who’s really satisfied with this year’s Oscar nominations. The most exciting movies of the year are almost unilaterally shut out. The slate of nominated directors is, with the exception of Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu, ...

One Dinner Too Far: Posh and The Riot Club
January 20, 2015
How are we to understand the violence inherent to the possession of wealth? In the mid-seventeenth century the revolutionary Digger Gerard Winstanley called the possession of immense private property the “kingly power” of men over men, the “great red dragon, the god of ...

Hollybaba’s Blockbusters
November 25, 2014
If movies can tell us anything about the internal lives of typical film industry executives, it’s that they like to feel like the most important people in any room, like they’re doing everyone else a favor by granting a meeting. So it takes truly special circumstances to ...

Nightcrawler: Flourishing in the Dark
November 13, 2014
Nightcrawler, a new thriller with a sense of humor by Dan Gilroy, is a recession-era American Psycho. It’s a story that grasps the misery of low wages and lower cunning. Or perhaps it could be described as the Hunger Games of capitalist exploitation, couched in a critique of ...