williamfleitch Page 6 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
History As Pop As Camp: <em>The Butler</em>, Reviewed.
1. Lee Daniels is a total lunatic of a director, a man who knows nothing of restraint, decorum or moderation. Sometimes this works for him; his Precious was lurid and garish and melodramatic in a way that fit the material, making the protagonist's sufferings feel both pulpy and weirdly real. Mostly,...
Subtle As A Boomsaw: <em>Elysium,</em> Reviewed.
1. Elysium, like writer-director Neill Blomkamp's much-loved first film District 9, is very concerned with making you understand that it is about something. I wasn't as big a fan of District 9 as most were—it felt like a great idea for a short film, which it was, stretched out to feature length—but ...
Lindsay Lohan Is the Only Part of <em>The Canyons</em> That Isn't Horrible
The Canyons opens (and ends, over the closing credits) with photographs of abandoned, dilapidated movie theaters, which would be the world's most obvious metaphor if the film were actually competent enough to be about what it wants to be about. Director Paul Schrader (who should know better) and wri...
<em>The Conjuring</em> Is Old-School Terrifying
The Conjuring didn't literally scare the piss out of me, but it was close, and all told, there might have been a dribble or two....
Giant Robots And Giant Aliens. <em>Pacific Rim</em>, Reviewed.
1. Lord help me, I couldn't have been happier coming out of Pacific Rim. It's not a great movie—it's just barely a good one—but it is a damned relief. This is not a sour, darkened, lumbering, origin-story-spinning blockbuster complete with plodding backstory and a faux antihero at its center. It is...
<em>Fruitvale Station</em> Will Make You Cry Like A Baby
Early in the morning on New Year's Day 2009, a 22-year-old man named Oscar Grant, on his way home with his girlfriend, was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cop while at the Fruitvale BART stop in Oakland. The incident was captured by dozens of commuters on a stopped train, and the...
The Grierson & Leitch Top 12 Movies Of The First Half Of 2013
Shockingly, we are more than halfway through 2013. As always, the best, most "prestigious" movies won't be released until November or December, because the people who vote on the Oscars are senile and cannot remember anything they saw more than 20 minutes ago. But there have been plenty of outstandi...
You Should Absolutely Not See <em>The Lone Ranger</em>
I just moved halfway across the country and didn't get a chance to see The Lone Ranger. I figured it was probably terrible and figured I'd ask Grierson to make sure. Thus, a conversation between someone who hasn't seen The Lone Ranger but suspects it's lousy and someone who has seen it and therefor...
Undead And Uptight: <em>World War Z</em>, Reviewed.
1. At this point, the zombie movie has gone through just about every permutation possible, from its low-budget schlock horror roots all the way into the world of comedy, faux-documentary, Western, even romance. The one thing we haven't seen yet from the zombie genre, at least until the release of W...
It's A Turd! It's Plain! <em>Man Of Steel</em>, Reviewed.
1. On the surface, it seems obvious why you'd attempt to reboot the Superman franchise using the Christopher Nolan-Batman model. Nolan's Dark Knight films are terrific, brooding and powerful, and, oh by the way, they grossed a combined $2.5 billion worldwide. But their trying to make a tortured-supe...
Joss Whedon Enjoys His Job More Than You Do
The best part about Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing is that it's not particularly proud of itself for adapting Shakespeare. Filmmakers tend to tackle the Bard out of hubris (the Mel Gibson Hamlet), an attempt to be some sort of authority (Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet), a flamboyant go-for-batshit-...
What Happened To The Jokes? <em>The Hangover, Part III,</em> Reviewed.
1. The Hangover, Part III is better than Part II, but not by much, and really only because it didn't just recycle, almost beat for beat, the plot of the first film. The plot it lands on this time isn't much better, though, and all told, it doesn't have much more energy than that film did. The two se...
<em>Before Midnight</em> Is Darker Than You Want It To Be
Did you want to learn that Jesse and Celine, the couple we fell in love with as they fell in love with each other in the Richard Linklater films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, have become cantankerous, unhappy middle-aged jerks? That their love has curdled into passive-aggressive routine and bare...
Connnnnnnn! <em>Star Trek Into Darkness</em>, Reviewed.
1. I've never gotten the sense that J.J. Abrams really cares all that much about the Star Trek franchise. Abrams has said that he was far more into Star Wars—as any reasonable person would be—and that his first, well-received Star Trek was more about rebooting a franchise than any particular passion...
Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Crap. <em>The Great Gatsby</em>, Reviewed.
1. I'm confused at to what Baz Luhrmann, the crazy over-the-top director of Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet, would possibly want with The Great Gatsby. Well, I see why he might like it as a theoretical challenge: What ambitious filmmaker (and Luhrmann is nothing if not ambitious) wouldn't want to tr...
<em>Iron Man 3</em>, Reviewed.
1. Other than that terrible Todd Phillips-Zach Galifianakis comedy Due Date, Robert Downey Jr. hasn't played a character other than Tony Stark or Sherlock Holmes in four years. Of all the actors who could have ended up settling into tentpole action star roles? Downey? I caught Robert Altman's Short...
Stuck In The <em>Mud</em>: I Just Don't Get Why Everyone Loves This Movie
Mud is a movie I don't get, and I don't think the problem is necessarily with me....
Benlands. Terrence Malick's <em>To The Wonder</em>, With A Silent Affleck, Reviewed.
1. You can make all the jokes you want about Terrence Malick's movies, particularly these last two later-era ones, whose interest in normal movie things like "plots" and "stories" and "coherent narratives" is minimal at best, but they knock my socks off. I know that both The Tree of Life and now To ...
For The Next Remake, Just Add More Blood: <i>Evil Dead</i>, Reviewed.
1. A good rule of thumb: If you are holding a book in your hands and you notice that someone has gone to the trouble of shutting that book with barbed wire, do not attempt to open this book. If you do open this book, then do not read from it–particularly when previous patrons of the Satan Public Lib...
I Have No Idea What This <i>Upstream Color</i> Movie Is About, But It Is Awesome
To make a list of things I do not understand about Shane Carruth's Upstream Color would be to simply list everything that happens in the movie. But lemme try out some questions on you anyway: Who is the man who kidnaps a woman and drugs her by feeding her a worm? And why does that worm cause her to ...