Did you completely forget that there’s a reboot in the works for Dutch filmmaking master Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop? Full disclosure: I sure did, and ignorance definitely felt an awful lot like bliss. The first trailer hit the Interwebs last night, and after taking a look, I’d be grateful to return to that idyllic state of not knowing. Hachi machi, this looks like a tone-deaf dud. I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m not giving the movie much of a chance, but I’ll also quickly point out that my wholesale disinterest in the production and my immediately prickly reaction to the footage has more to do with the fact that…
-
-
G-S-T Review…Drinking Buddies
Drinking Buddies offers a refreshingly candid look at relationships from the perspective of the romantic comedy genre. While the film explores similar themes and questions around relationships and monogamy that we’ve seen from director Joe Swanberg’s films in the past, Drinking Buddies is something special. Arguably his best film yet, he accomplishes something rarely found in feature films today, that perfect mix of indie Art House feel and mass appeal. It’s not so obscure that it alienates the general audience, but it also avoids being formulaic. It’s the culmination of Swanberg’s mumblecore roots combined with a narrative structure (or lack there of) that works to create a story utterly authentic…
-
G-S-T Review…Riddick
Vin Diesel has never seemed more comfortable in a role than he is playing the intergalactic space criminal known as Riddick. His latest in the trilogy, simply titled Riddick, is an effectively dumb and fun film that plays to its strengths and doesn’t get lost in chasing rabbits. There are the familiar tropes throughout, but rarely can I remember three films that feel so different yet similar. I know that last sentence doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but neither does the way the films flow into each other. Pitch Black was effectively a fantasy thriller that put Vin Diesel on the cinematic map before he exploded in The…
-
Sweet Trailer…'Gravity'
How do you sum up seven years of anticipation in succinct, clean prose? Alfonso Cuarón hasn’t had a film in theaters in nearly a decade, but he’s been hard at work on his latest, Gravity, for nearly that entire span of time; couple the movie’s long gestation period with an observation on the quality of his preceding work, Children of Men, and Gravity immediately becomes the sort of project any dyed-in-the-wool cinephile worth their salt will accord their attention and their unabashed excitement (both of which are sure to be intensified in light of the wildly positive early reviews out of VIFF). So, with that in mind, here’s the full…
-
‘Blue Jasmine’: Empathy For The Elite
Blue Jasmine is a film about the 1% and Bernie Madoff that actually isn’t about either of these things at all; they’re elements of window dressing rather than substance, as Woody Allen’s eponymous heroine might herself declare. They only comprise the film’s backdrop, against which Allen fashions his examination of Jasmine’s shame, guilt, and inability to assume personal responsibility over her life, while also posing a fundamental question whose answer invariably shapes our response as the audience. Can we accord sympathy to a has-been member of America’s obscene wealth culture? If no, then Blue Jasmine may resemble a variation on cruel revenge fantasy, or simply play out as a colossal waste of time.…
