williamfleitch Page 8 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
A Suffocating Triumph: <em>Zero Dark Thirty</em>, Reviewed
1. I've always thought the best compliment you can give a movie is that, while it's playing, you forget not only that you are watching a movie, but also that you are a person with a life that was going on before the movie and will continue going on afterward. These are the transformative films, the ...
The Deep Breath Before The Plunge. <em>The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey</em>, Reviewed.
1. It's always important to remember that the first film of any trilogy—particularly one that has to not only introduce a bunch of new characters but take time to remind us of all the people/dwarves/elves/wizards we'd forgotten in the nine years since we last saw them—is always going to be the slowe...
Grierson & Leitch's Year In Review: Your Favorite Movie Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad
Yes, many people are already writing their Top 10 movie lists for 2012. We're saving ours for the last week of the year, but while we wait for this full, rich, and weird movie year to end, we're looking back at certain highlights and lowlights. Today: We look at a financially successful movie, a leg...
Grierson & Leitch's Year In Review: The Year's Worst Scenes
Yes, many people are already writing their Top 10 movie lists for 2012. We're saving ours for the last week of the year, but while we wait for this full, rich, and weird movie year to end, we're going to start looking back at certain highlights. Today, it's our least-favorite individual scenes....
Bill Murray: A Traitor To His Crass. <em>Hyde Park on Hudson</em>, Reviewed.
1. Everything about Hyde Park on Hudson feels like it's taking place in a wax museum. Actually, that's not giving it enough credit: It's more like the Hall of Presidents robotic displays at Walt Disney World....
Grierson & Leitch's Year In Review: The Year's Best Scenes
Yes, many people are already writing their Top 10 movie lists for 2012. We're saving ours for the last week of the year, but while we wait for this full, rich, and weird movie year to end, we're going to start looking back at certain highlights. Today, it's our favorite individual scenes....
Bill Murray Is Better Than The Oscars
About 10 months ago, Gawker's Rich Juzwiak put together on his personal site what has to be the most useful, repeatedly entertaining animated GIF I've ever seen. It's simple, basic, and genius: merely a look at the reaction shots of every Best Actor and Best Actress nominees in the seconds after the...
Grierson & Leitch's Year In Review: The Performances Best Forgotten
Yes, many people are already writing their Top 10 movie lists for 2012. We're saving ours for the last week of the year, but while we wait for this full, rich, and weird movie year to end, we're going to start looking back at certain highlights. Tuesday, we looked at performances this year that have...
Damn It Feels Profound To Be A Gangster: <em>Killing Them Softly</em>, Reviewed
1. Killing Them Softly is a polemic disguised as a thriller, a series of scenes featuring various tiers of low-level gangsters shooting, talking, drinking, and complaining, unaware, somewhat blissfully, that they're all metaphors. (It's hard enough to be a gangster without having to walk around symb...
Grierson & Leitch's Year In Review: The Best Forgotten Performances
Yes, many people are already writing their Top 10 movie lists for 2012. We're saving ours for the last week of the year, but while we wait for this full, rich, and weird movie year to end, we're going to start looking back at certain highlights. Today, it's our favorite performances that won't be re...
Incense And Disappointments. <em>Life of Pi</em>, Reviewed.
1. Life of Pi is about 65 minutes of staggering cinematic beauty surrounded by 55 minutes of touchy-feely New Age claptrap. You recognize the kind, with its choose-your-own-adventure brand of spirituality, and God as captain of the ship sailing everyone's personal journey for self-fulfillment and un...
Will We Ever Hear From These <em>Twilight</em> People Again?
Friday brings with it the end of the half-decade scourge of the Twilight films. There have been five of them, and I have to confess to you, I haven't seen a single one of them. I know they are about vampires, I know the books they're based off are terrible, and I know that they make a shit-ton of mo...
Vincible. <em>Silver Linings Playbook</em>, Reviewed.
1. She's a grieving cop's widow, prone to nymphomania, locked away in a shed behind her parents' home, profoundly damaged—not broken, but close. He's a bipolar basket case who nearly beat a man half to death for showering with his wife, the same wife with whom he obsessively wants to reconcile, even...
Other Than That, How Was The Movie? <em>Lincoln</em>, Reviewed.
1. The opening scene of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln will probably ring false to you and confirm your preconceptions of a sweeping, soft-focus, John Williams-scored Steven Spielberg film about Abraham Lincoln. It features Lincoln, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, visiting troops right before a fierce Civil...
The Grierson & Leitch Endorsements: Our Best Movie Presidents
In the spirit of Election Day, we here at Grierson & Leitch headquarters have decided to do our own formal endorsements. These are our full-throated endorsements of the cinematic candidates who have shown they have the fortitude and judgment to lead this great land....
Washington's Height. <em>Flight</em> Reviewed.
1. Until the last 10 minutes, Flight in large part resembles one of those tough, dark character studies they used to make in the '70s, like The Gambler or The Verdict, in which we watch a man who has lost control of his life face external circumstances that give him one last chance to save himself. ...
The Man With The Ham Fists: RZA's Kung Fu Movie Just Doesn't Work
In 1995, Quentin Tarantino, skinny, wired, at the absolute peak of his power and influence, showed up at the MTV Movie Awards to give a lifetime achievement award to Jackie Chan. This is just how huge Tarantino was at the time: MTV allowed him to take 10 minutes of its airtime to give a career-cappi...
<em>Cloud Atlas</em>: Crazy, Brilliant, Or Both? A Grierson & Leitch Discussion
Occasionally, one of Grierson & Leitch will disagree strongly enough with the other that a discussion is in order. Last time this happened was Compliance, which Grierson loved and Leitch didn't. (That one was a huge pageview hit because it had the word "blowjobs" in the headline.) This week, Grierso...
The Late-October Best Picture Oscars Predictions You've Been Waiting For
Coverage of the Oscars has reached tail-wagging-dog proportions in recent years: Rather than an awards show looking back at a year of films and choosing the best of them, the Academy Awards have become the journey and the destination. Not only do movies exist solely to win Oscars, but there are whol...
A Big Huge Ball Of Crazy. <em>Cloud Atlas</em>, Reviewed.
1. I've never read the book Cloud Atlas, but I bet it's good. Judging from the film, the book must be insanely ambitious—narratively and stylistically—clearly vying to be no less than some sort of grand binding theory of everything, throughout history, forever. That sort of ambition can work on the ...