Movie Review

Ostensibly the story of the inspiration behind Scottish playwright JM Barrie’s most famous work Peter Pan this movie is really more about the choices we make, about inspiration versus convention, about the fantastic versus the ordinary, about hope versus hopelessness.
[Read more…] about Finding Neverland

Sometime this summer, either because of the lackluster quality of this year’s movies or because of my own feeling that they were superfluous, I quit writing movie reviews. I’ve realized lately that I enjoy writing them so here’s a bit of catch-up on a few things I’ve seen recently.
[Read more…] about Movie review catchup

It’s a two-fer today:

Watching ordinary people making love, with occasional fumbles and aches, rather than idealized screen gods and goddesses in the throes of heaving, orchestra-backed passion, compels us to reflect on our personal knowledge of the connection between desire and affection.

One of time’s cruelest jests is its tendency to transform us into what we once despised.

— Joel E. Siegel

Joel E. Siegel was the arts reviewer for a number of papers in DC, most recently The Washington City Paper and while I didn’t always agree with is opinion, his reviews were always interesting to read. He died last week at 64. His cynicism and wit will be missed.

What does SAT stand for these days? This film opens by positing that SAT stands for Suck Ass Test. In truth, SAT stands for absolutely nothing. ETS, the Educational Testing Service, which governs the lives of every single hopeful person on the globe who wishes to attend a university in the U.S. recently “rebranded” SAT from Scholastic Aptitude Test to just SAT. Whatever it means, this test standing between Kyle (Chris Evans) and his dream of architecture school at Cornell University. Like any self-centered, upper middle-class kid in post-modern America would, Kyle decides to steal the answers to the SAT (like studying, maybe, is so difficult? Yeah, the SAT is racially biased, yeah, the SAT is gender biased, yeah, the SAT is biased toward kids who live in urban areas. Get over it. We all had to take it.)
[Read more…] about The Perfect Score

Based on an oft-quoted premise of chaos theory — that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can cause a tidal wave in New York City — this movie gives us Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) who has inherited not only his father’s memory blackouts but also his father’s ability to retreat into his memories and change events thereby creating an alternate reality. While this film deals superficially with the concept of time, memory, and cause and effect it never manages to transcend the filmmakers’ fascination with their lead performer’s beauty.
[Read more…] about The Butterfly Effect