dvd of the week Joaquin Phoenix plays Larry “Doc” Sportello, a pothead private investigator who works out of a doctor’s office near the beach in 1970s Los Angeles. He’s disheveled, confused, bumbling and occasionally philosophical. One day, his ex-lover, an ethereal blonde named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, serving hippie realness), appears out of nowhere…
I’m not a fan of the phrasing “there are two kinds of people: the kind of people who like X and the kind of people who hate X.” It’s hackneyed, and not always true. Some people just don’t care about X. I guess the point is that X is something people have strong feelings about,…
dvr this Available for rent at Redbox Instant Voted the Best Film of 2013 by the San Diego Film Critics Society, Her is the least flashy of Spike Jonze’s movies, substituting the wondrous quirk of Being John Malkovich with a lush depiction of romance. That romance, however, is between a lonely writer of love-notes named…
Two years ago, Apple introduced Siri, a program for their iPhones that acts like a personal assistant, complete with a female voice. You talk to it, it talks back, and the famous advertisements featured conversations between celebrities and Siri that made her seem, well, intelligent. Anyone who has used Siri knows Siri isn’t as helpful…
dvd of the week 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. While it may have been inspired by L. Ron Hubbard’s early days, it…
