Good Is The New Bad – Film Reviews And More

    Here’s a new maxim for Young Hollywood… Friends don’t let Friends direct friends’ screenplays. Working with your longtime friends, though, is a much better idea. Simon Pegg, the star of Run Fatboy Run, is an English comic actor and cult film hero. Working with longtime collaborators Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, he has [...]

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Be Kind, Rewind is the cinematic equivalent of a letter to Santa Claus. It’s an extended, naive fantasia; brimming over with good-natured longing but it’s also as insubstantial as that North Pole address. The film is centered around a ramshackle video store in Passaic, New Jersey; ostensibly the birthplace of jazz great Fats Waller. The [...]

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This movie is so vanilla, it turned Samuel L. Jackson‘s hair white.

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Just released on DVD is one of the most interesting and unsung films of 2007 – Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone. Originally a novel by Dennis Lehane – the author behind Clint Eastwood’s unreasonably grim Mystic River – it’s standard fare pulp fiction that’s elevated by thoughtful and nuanced direction and a full complement of [...]

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If hope, as Emily Dickinson wrote “is the thing with feathers”, then hype is the two hundred foot tall scaly sea-monster with an appetite for concrete, perched in midtown Manhattan and singing a song of destruction. It started with a trailer last summer, too cool to even have a name on it. Then months of [...]

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In Chinatown, the malignant Noah Cross remarks that “politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” He could have easily added filmmakers to that list. Hollywood is as brutal a business as any on the planet. It’s also fond of snubbing great works, and showering accolades upon lesser contributions if [...]

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Some movies are like churches – built like imposing stone edifices. From the moment you enter their presence, they demand a hushed reverence, and that your head be bowed with awe. Even to the non-religious, the sheer scale of the monument demands respect. While it’s almost impossible to stand on the steps of the great [...]

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Success can be its own worst enemy. In Hollywood, winning the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar is a creative kiss of death. As an award, it’s more of a fashionable choice than a serious referendum on quality. Since 1986, there are only two directors who have produced any creatively significant work after winning their Best Picture Oscar. [...]

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