About this column:
A weekly column on the world of cinema from an avid movie lover.I'm not sure why, but people tend to have compelling tales of where they were and what they were doing when the events of September 11, 2001 occurred. I was entering day two or three of a temp job. All at once, the head honcho erupted from her office to announce, as if it were a rare bird sighting, that someone from New York had called her and that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers. The news was framed, initially, as some sort of horrible air traffic accident. And then I went home for lunch and flipped on the news, only to find that the situation was significantly …
Last week I was on vacation in North Carolina. Clearly I could not have timed it any better. Vacationers this week found their visit cut short by mandatory evacuations in anticipation of Miss Irene and her fast-blowing, rain-soaked ways. While I was there, I happened upon the Fall Movie Preview that Entertainment Weekly puts out each year. When I was a subscriber - before I got tired of how gossip-rag it had become - this issue used to be the grand prize of the year. When this baby showed up in the mailbox, I typically read it cover to cover more than once. My initial plan was to simply use …
Obviously, this one has to be laced with a spoiler alert. It's right there in the title. And just a word about the so-called "spoiler alert." The value of endings changes with context. The films I'm discussing below - Pulp Fiction and Go - are not films whose ending is the whole shebang. There's no big reveal of Keyser Soze's true identity, no sudden realization that we've known all along that Bruce Willis was... (well, you know), and neither film ties its entirety together with a singular object or device, like Charles Foster Kane's childhood sled (you know, the one that stands for innocence…
I don't mean to be the worst writer of all time, but in scanning ahead to the end of August, I'm going to go ahead and close the book on this Summer Movie Season by telling you, unequivocally, that I'm not going to see another film as good as Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Not suggesting the triple threat of Cowboys & Aliens, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Conan the Barbarian won't do some trick, but I will submit that, at least for me, it won't do THE trick. As the winner of this past year's Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival, The Tree of Life joins interesting company but - …
I have been a Netflix customer now for nearly 10 years. In 2002, when I first started participating, I used Netflix as an art-house supplement to the mainstream films I was carting home from the video store each week. My Internet was dial-up at the time, so even if the streaming feature had existed, I would not have been able to take part. At the time, I remember being exhilarated by the business model (I even looked into buying stock before realizing that I had no money). It was a delivery device for my drug of choice, placed in my mailbox within one day of my configuring (and reconfiguring…
Some of the things I wrote about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, shortly after it was released in 2001, were influenced by my having read the book. It was the only selection of Rowling's run I would bother with. I remember having been disappointed by it, no doubt due to the deafening buzz preceding it, and I also remember that it wasn't a bad way to enter the world of the film: Familiar and hopeful that it would be a better version of the story than the experience of reading the book had been. From that review: "The most notable thing to report on this film is that it evokes a magical …
What is the perfect antidote for yet another sequel-mad summer with more to promise than to deliver? Had your interest peaked by the far and wide locales, glossy special effects and expensive looking everything out there in the multiplex? Had your interest dashed by actually sitting through some of these films? Have I got a two-for-one deal for you. (Not really, though, because you should pay for both films to support these filmmakers.) If it’s a break from the gloss you’re after, please accept the following recommendation: Buy local. And by local, I mean local indie films. And because …
Bested only twice in 10 years as Oscar's Best Animated Feature, Pixar usually carries the weight as the best animated film in the category even when it doesn’t win. In a sea of animated mediocrity, the backlot with the bouncing lamp produces films better than nearly anything being released in the live action set. When Disney began its long, stale run after the renaissance of the early 90s, the Pixar division perked things up and carried the torch. I found myself using phrases like "the mere presence of consistent - if monotonously unceremonious - quality" as backdoor compliments for the films…
Being as we just cleared the first day of Summer, let’s talk HOT. To get in the mood for the weather that's about to swallow us whole throughout July and August, let’s talk about some sweat-drenched people. Let’s talk about the kind of body heat – but not Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (too easy) – that might have caused Al Pacino to tell Jonathan Pryce (in Glengarry Glen Ross) that "it was so hot in the city today, grown men were walking up to cops on street corners begging them to shoot them.” I’m not going to look at the obvious choices like Fahrenheit 451 or Backdraft. Nothing that features …
Summer time is upon us. Going to be a lot of filmgoing. Perhaps we should discuss the ground rules. I think it’s time. I think you're old enough. Cinema Etiquette and Protocol (for those that speak Bocce) 1. How do we handle someone who desperately wants to discuss a film we haven’t yet seen but plan to see (and the reciprocal)? I find myself on the other side of this coin more often than not, hoping to be able to discuss a film, but finding myself having to hold back precious details. (I believe the term “spoiler alert” was coined within the context of one of these exchanges.) Typically, …
I am not a gossip columnist. Let's get that out of the way first. I am also not a moralist. Because I am not a moralist, I don't require my artists to conform to any sort of behavior off screen. I simply do not care. Without meaning to, I somehow became aware that Reese Witherspoon received something called The Generation Award at the MTV Movie Awards last weekend. I am not entirely sure the motive laced with her being "awarded", but I did learn that the award had resurfaced after years of being dormant. Initially, this was a spoof award given as MTV's version of the Academy Honorary Award. …
Because last week I reveled in the dismally one-sided representation of pirates on film, I thought perhaps I'd counter with a genre Hollywood repeatedly gets right, in both mass markets and in underserved ones: The War Film. (It's also rather topical, as we're just a few days past Memorial Day, but I'm sure that occurred to you already.) Quite deservingly, those who died in combat are in our thoughts and in our hearts on Memorial Day. We owe them more than we can imagine. But another group - civilians affected during wartime - often escape mention. Besides being marginally obscure - or, in …
When I was younger, I wanted the movie industry - as I understood it then, in vague terms - to come up with a series of films about pirates that were raw, vicious and unyielding. Because I spent a great deal of time poring over books that portrayed pirates as the sadistic malcontents they probably were, I wanted to see those same gritty seafarers reflected with a note of genuine terror on the big screen. I suggested that nothing would please me more than a handful of well-researched, deeply real-feeling (preferably unrated) films about Buccaneers. Occupying the opposite end of the spectrum, …
Everybody knows this feeling. You've just allowed your brain to travel into the world of a film for two hours. You sat in the dark. You sat in the air conditioning. When you exit the theater, your eyes are suddenly bombarded with light and your clammy skin can practically taste the humidity. And further more, aside from the physical adjustments, you realize - all of the sudden - how unbelievably committed to the premise of cinematic submersion you were. Reality is upon you and you have mixed feelings about returning to it. Some of this is true of any trip to the cinema, but the summertime …
About two weeks ago, in response to a recent acceleration in the pay-per-view process, Joe Roth, the founder of Revolution studios, suggested that it was time to reopen a long dormant can of worms: The question of whether a studio should be allowed to own and operate its own chain of movie theaters. He was discussing this in the context of how VOD might impact ticket sales. VOD – or, video on demand – is the handle given to a recent option that allows a viewer to watch a movie on your television just two months after its release. It costs $30 and you can watch it within a 48-hour window. …
Spinning a vision of our commonalities that exudes sunshine and candy, ignoring pesky details and, often, using calculated focus to help us blot out an otherwise dysfunctional periphery - - cinema has always been the good politician. And the good politician spends every one of his days making people feel valued and worthwhile. After awhile, though, one can't help but feel like the politician, er, *cinema* is only pretending. And so we get cookie cutters and makeup with safe, noble intentions that only serve to call attention to themselves until its time for everything to be wrapped up in neat…
Once upon a time, shortly after the light had gone out of pretty standard high school and college newspaper stints, Ben Trout had a website. Fiercely snobbish, clumsily verbose and, often, contradictory, I learned a great deal about myself while deconstructing films on this seldom viewed but obsessively updated web space. Though I maintained it through 2009, its humble beginnings were nothing if not foolhardy and ambitious: In addition to repertory and repeat viewings, I decided the fate of 200+ new releases for nearly four years straight. After that, I could articulate my own taste better …
