Argo The thing about making movies based on true stories is that it’s hard to keep them suspenseful. This is especially so when the story is so famous, and everything but the smaller details are rather well known. Ben Affleck’s fantastic new film Argo is based on such an event: The Iran hostage crisis from…
Toward the end of David France’s extraordinary documentary about the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, and its off-shoot the Treatment Action Group, or TAG, playwright and ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer says, “We, ACT-UP, got those drugs out there. It’s the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim.” Kramer,…
San Diego LGBT Weekly: Why did you decide that this film was needed? Why tell the story of ACT-UP now? David France: For some time, I’d been thinking that someone needs to look back at the plague years and make sense of them. The majority of the work on AIDS [such as And the Band…
Pitch Perfect Why college campuses, especially on the East Coast, are overpopulated with a cappella groups is a mystery to me. Virtually no one who isn’t on a college campus pays to see a cappella groups. No one buys their albums, and I don’t know anyone who can name an a cappella group that isn’t…
The Master While a great deal of the press about The Master is focused on how it is supposedly a fictional retelling of the birth of Scientology, I think this does a disservice to both the film and to Scientology. A comparison: The Social Network was a fictional retelling of the birth of Facebook: The…
I think that few things are duller than a plagiarism scandal. I’ve worked as an editor, a literary agent, a journalist, and I currently teach writing, so I take plagiarism very seriously – no one should ever put their name on the words written by someone else. It’s lazy and dishonest. But as moral crimes…
The Campaign In case you haven’t noticed, we’re smack dab in the middle of the silly season. This is the period during a political campaign when the promises, claims, attacks and revelations get so desperate and weird and implausible that “silly” is the only word that really describes it all. A few weeks ago, not…
Cosmopolis A few years ago, I was reading Don DeLillo’s Libra, a speculative novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and I remarked to a literary critic that none of DeLillo’s characters spoke like recognizable people, and they all spoke alike in their staccato pretentiousness. But there was one exception: Oswald’s wife, Marina, had…
During one of the arguments Whitney Houston’s character in Sparkle has with her daughters about why they shouldn’t try to make it in the music industry, she says, “Was my life not enough of a cautionary tale for you?” It’s a startling moment, to say the least. When Houston uttered it, the film set must…
The Bourne Legacy The three previous Bourne movies were big deals, popular among both average and uppity filmgoers, because they were actually thrilling spy thrillers made with virtually no special effects, directed by the auteurs Doug Limon (The Bourne Identity) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy and Ultimatum), and all written tautly by Tony Gilroy…
