The latest Wolverine adventure, if nothing else, is a return to form. Instead of holding the clawed mutant back, director James Mangold truly unleashes the beast within. We find Logan beaten and withered from his travels and in hiding from his snarling ways. When he finds something to fight for, though, he truly lets it out unlike we’ve seen before. The other nice thing in this adventure is that a change of setting is fully embraced. Fans of the character from the comics will know Frank Miller’s influential comic storyline of Logan’s travels to Japan. The film plays to a lot of the same beats, though it has some clever…
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G-S-T Review…Fruitvale Station
How can anyone review, much less watch, Fruitvale Station without bringing up the 18th Florida circuit court’s verdict in the George Zimmerman trial? The film, which comes courtesy of newcomer Ryan Coogler and marks one of 2013’s most noteworthy debuts, doesn’t reignite national discourse on social justice, race, and the second amendment in the US so much as it reinforces it; to call Fruitvale Station “timely” would be an understatement, though that’s not at all to imply shrewd, heartless planning on Coogler’s or the studio’s behalf. Chalk the picture’s release up to a happy (or unhappy, depending on how you look at it) coincidence, and then gird yourself for a…
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G-S-T Review…Blackfish
Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite throws a lot of information at us in less than an hour and a half, and it’s all crucial to making sense of the narrative she follows in her searing, heartbreaking, somber film. The good news is that she’s an ace filmmaker, and she knows how to convey everything that we need to know effectively, efficiently, and with clarity, but that knowledge must be served with a simple caveat: you can’t unlearn what Blackfish teaches, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. Cowperthwaite’s picture documents inhuman abuses inflicted upon non-human creatures in stunning enough detail to turn even the most dedicated SeaWorld fanatic into an outraged protester. In…
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G-S-T Review…The To Do List
Someone needs to start a Kickstarter campaign to get Aubrey Plaza some acting lessons. That comment sounds infinitely more cruel than intended; Plaza has long been a pivotal, hilarious supporting figure on NBC’s fantastic sitcom Parks and Recreation, and just last year she took a solid starring turn alongside Mark Duplass in Safety Not Guaranteed, but the numerous delights of her work in both underscore the limits of her range as a performer. There’s nothing wrong with having a niche, of course, but her schtick – “deadpan, apathetic, couldn’t-care-less twenty-something” – is not only specific in the extreme but also incapable of sustaining a feature-length picture for its total running…