Review: Twilight

Catherine Hardwicke no doubt set out to make a gritty drama of teen angst set against the backdrop of the dreary Pacific Northwest, but a few weeks prior to shooting, a producer must have handed her a script for “Twilight” and said make this instead. The first screen adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s bestselling romantic vampire series is like a cheap wine looking for a bottle, which is really a shame because I would surely lap it up if only served properly. Targeted at teenage girls, it would seem my age and gender preclude me from this discussion, however I believe that young women are yearning for much more from their heroines, so let’s get started with the nit pickiness. Read on...

Review: Pineapple Express

It had to happen sometime. As much as I had hoped to stave it off for as long as possible, the day had to come when I would leave a Judd Apatow production utterly dissatisfied. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” nearly did me in, but further rumination on the film showed a real maturation happening in the cabal of dirty little boys that surround the Hollywood comedy magnate. Too bad that the progression toward a better kind of toilet humor didn’t make it’s way into the teams latest, and arguably most anticipated, “Pineapple Express”.
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Review: No Country For Old Men

In critical circles it is often mentioned that foreigners often have the best perspective to make films about American life and history. This argument will cite Polanski’s Chinatown; Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; Wenders’s Paris, Texas; and countless others as proof of the notion that American-ness is something best considered from afar. However, there are two boys from Minneapolis who throw a little kink into that tried and true theory.

With No Country For Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen have further developed their tireless effort to understand what it is to be a citizen of this qcountry and, duly, of the world. In the most basic sense, the film is about chasing the American dream, represented here, as a bag full of money. There are three men going after a piece of the pie: the everyman, the lawman, and the (not so) dark other. How about we rewind and do that again with more semi-colons: Llewelyn Moss, played with indomitable timbre by Josh Brolin; Ed Tom Bell, the once-and-future narrator offered up by Tommy Lee Jones and the deep pockets beneath his weary eyes; and Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, who will get his own paragraph should you care to read on. Read on...