Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street A couple weeks ago, a woman named Christina McDowell published a scathing essay in LA Weekly attacking The Wolf of Wall Street, its director Martin Scorsese and its star Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie, a three-hour orgiastic comedy about Wall Street con men, is based…
In the early 1960s, many of the now-iconic folk singers earned their followings and made reputations in the smoky, cramped clubs in New York’s Greenwich Village. This is where you could hear Bob Dylan, Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell, and be close enough to see the spittle on their lips. As history usually works, we…
Philomena I recently saw a comment about Philomena that described it as the inoffensive movie your mother will love. While I didn’t quite find that to reach the level of offensive, it did stick in my craw. Of course, there are movies cynically made for specific audiences – Tyler Perry makes movies largely for black…
I’ve started to think that when judging movies we should not compare them all on an equal plane. They should be placed into specific categories, and these shouldn’t be based on genre, like comedy or drama, but rather on budget. A movie with a $5 million budget, for instance, doesn’t deserve to be placed next…
Nebraska I am a sucker for father-son movies, so much so that I’ve wept openly at movies of such disparate quality as the lovely The Sum of Us (Russell Crowe’s gay son living with his hilariously supportive father Jack Thompson), the fine Frequency (Jim Caviezel talking with dead father Dennis Quaid through a mystical shortwave…
There’s nothing remotely interesting about Blue is the Warmest Color except everything. The three-hour lesbian love story in French that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year features all of the oldest tropes of both love stories and queer love stories. We have the same boy meets girl, loses girl, tries to get girl…
A large number of writers have been credited with the phrase “kill all your darlings.” I had always thought it was Dorothy Parker, and the Internet claims it is William Faulkner or Stephen King. A recent Slate article places its origin as a writing guide from 1913. Whoever said it first, it’s been a key…
I’m sure some evolutionary psychologist has come up with a theory about why so many men get so much pleasure out of driving exceedingly fast. Speed, whether on foot or on a horse or in a mechanical contraption, makes us feel invincible, making us feel either that we can out run any enemy or catch…
Prisoners About half way through Denis Villeneuve’s haunting, absorbing and morally problematic Prisoners, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are screaming at each other. Keller is insisting that he knows that Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is the man who has kidnapped and hidden his and Franklin’s young daughters; Franklin, in tears, keeps…
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who has been working at a large Hollywood studio. The conversation came around to closeted actors and actresses, and my friend repeated what another friend told her, “Vin Diesel? Oh, she’s a lady.” I laughed, not because it would be funny if…
