I now live five blocks from the giant blue Scientology building in Hollywood, and I often catch a bus at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, where young Scientologists, wearing blue blazers and solicitous smiles pass out proselytizing leaflets proclaiming, as all religions do, that they have the true answers to enlightenment. I…
In what has surely unnerved Tom Cruise and his agents, his latest film, the massively budgeted Doug Limon-directed sci-fi action movie Edge of Tomorrow, got among the best reviews of any of the summer’s blockbusters and barely managed to earn half of its budget back in the United States. (The film made a firm profit…
dvd of the week If you forget that you hate Tom Cruise, you may like him in Oblivion, which is a serious, artful science fiction film hidden behind the veneer of a shoot-‘em-up blockbuster. Cruise plays Jack Harper, who along with his girlfriend Victoria (a most excellent Andrea Riseborough), is tasked with managing and repairing…
If you are on Facebook (duh!) then you might have noticed a recent weekly phenomenon that has come to be known as Throwback Thursday. It is an opportunity for “friends” to post an image of themselves from sometime in the past so that we can all laugh and/or go ahhh. Quite often the photo is…
Oblivion The screening at which I saw Oblivion was, as many advanced screenings are, hosted by a local radio station that had given away passes to contest winners. Usually, someone low on the totem pole at the station gives away T-shirts and tries to get the crowd excited that they got to see a movie…
