Film & Television
A new documentary: "Build Me a World"
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, we live in two cities. The first is the smart city: Volkswagen, Amazon, and a history of wealth. The second is a world away: bottom-rung public school...
Other Post
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New Values and a New Quest
January 16, 2013 -
Hugo's Hope: "Les Misérables" on Screen and Stage
January 09, 2013 -
Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit": Embellishment is an Understatement
December 14, 2012 -
Freaks, Geeks, and Subverting the Politics of Fashion
December 07, 2012 -
A Film Divided
December 03, 2012 -
"Life of Pi" Isn't Enough
November 26, 2012
Big Laughs, Cheap Grace
The family gathers at the home of the patriarch. Bitterness is in the air. The son-in-law is wounded. He’s suffered another in a series of emotional and physical assaults from the patriarch. The patriarch is firm; the assault was simply the younger man’s fault, he insists. His daughter finally coaxes an eye-rolling apology from him. The peace is uneasy, and will be broken again soon. Probably next w...
Meta-Mocks
Donald Kaufman reminded us, "There hasn't been a new film genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary." But we need an addendum to that scene of Adaptation. In the past year, two movies were released that blurred the lines between documentary and mockumentary. The more popular was I'm Still Here, the "hoax" film about Joaquin Phoenix's downward spiral out of show-business. The more interesting film was Blood Into W...
Mattie Ross and the Golden Age of Feminine Aplomb
The magic of the Coen Brothers' 2010 True Grit adaptation is that they get 14-year-old female spunk exactly right. Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) possesses intellect, courage, and idealism that brought to mind Mary Pipher's 1994 book Reviving Ophelia, which argues that before puberty girls are the most confident humans on the planet. Fourteen is a golden age of feminine aplomb, and Joel and Ethan Coen have a track ...
Tiny Furniture and Tiny Milestones
In Tiny Furniture, Aura (Lena Dunham), a recently single college grad returns home to her mother’s TriBeCa loft with no idea what comes next. While her mother and over achieving younger sister are off touring colleges, Aura takes in Jed (Alex Karpovsky), a broke, YouTube comic ‘celebrity’ on a so-called business trip. Aura is too busy with her own self-pity to mind Jed leeching off of her kindness, nor does s...
The Failure of the Dawn Treader
There are many different ways to analyze a film based on a book. It can be assessed simply as a movie without reference to the book; or on its success in translating all the details of plot, character, dialogue, and description from the page to the screen; or as an expression of the original author’s worldview. Unfortunately, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader fails on all of these grounds. ...
A Valediction to the Harry Potter Film Franchise (Part 1), or How the Books are Really to Blame
There are two main camps in the Harry Potter movie-book dispute. On one side are those who’ve read all the books. They routinely talk about having grown old with the characters, referring to bit characters fondly as if they are actually friends. As a result, the films do not agree with them. They’ve never found any adaptation to be particularly satisfying, and each one is fervently picked to pieces for having cha...
Insecurity, Creativity, and Superiority
At the end of The Social Network, David Fincher’s film chronicling the creation of the social networking site Facebook, I found myself asking the question, What motivates my own creativity? Why do I feel the need to make or say something meaningful? I know the answer isn’t all benign. Mixed with the joy of creating and communicating are feelings of insecurity and the need to prove my worth. In the film, ingenuity...
