There’s nothing worse than reviewing a mediocre film made up of a trio of elements I actually like. In that respect, Black Nativity is a compressed version of my personal hell; it’s helmed by Kasi Lemmons, the gifted director behind such treasures as Talk to Me and Eve’s Bayou, it boasts a phenomenal cast that begins with Forest Whitaker (nearly ubiquitous in 2013) and ends with Angela Bassett, and it calls on the works of the great Langston Hughes to serve as its foundation. But none of that winds up mattering much, because ultimately Black Nativity winds up doing little more than just existing; it’s there, but it’s not especially good. If you’re a glass half-full type, that suggests the…
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G-S-T Review…Alexander Payne's Nebraska
Nebraska could well just be subtitled as The Importance of Being Monotint. In a year where everyone and their cool grandma has gone back to black and white, Alexander Payne uses the absence of chroma better than most, or at least in a way that’s more viscerally effective. In two hours, Payne cobbles together a shockingly accurate portrait of the US’s flyover states, at least as envisioned by those of us living on the East and West coasts; they’re desolate, barren, cultural wastelands, places that time has forgotten, populated by people modernity has passed by. Seems like the perfect starting point for an acerbically funny critique of the world Payne himself…
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Off the Shelf…’Frances Ha’
Culturally, Frances Ha almost feels like Noah Baumbach issuing a challenge to all listless twenty-somethings stubbornly fixated on spending their time finding themselves: get found already, dammit. Throughout his career, Baumbach has showcased a knack for capturing the unbearable sensation of being emotionally unmoored, and across his entire filmography, Frances Ha – lyrical, succinct, rapturously authentic – may display that talent better than the rest. Think of it as a quartet of Girls episodes mashed together into an eighty minute bonanza of comic incident, if you must; the film is set in New York, and focuses on the travails of a young, white, up and coming female struggling to make her dreams come…
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G-S-T Review…Narco Cultura
Mexico’s longstanding drug war has made for some stellar visual media in the last few years, influencing aspects of shows like Breaking Bad and providing a blueprint for films like 2012’s Savages or, much more recently, The Counselor; sitting pretty from afar, the ultra-violence that punctuates the wheeling and dealings of this outrageously lucrative business makes for a viscerally captivating narrative, allowing us to portray the realities of cartel brutality while skirting around genuinely confronting them. It’s human tragedy made into slick entertainment, not necessarily ignorant of the legitimate suffering they’re cashing in on but almost always woefully reluctant to fully confront it. Shaul Schwarz, however, isn’t satisfied with addressing…
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Solomon Survives: The Modernity Of ’12 Years a Slave’
From behind the iron-barred basement windows of a faceless tenement building nestled alongside so many others that look just like it, a man frantically cries out for aid. His words echo fruitlessly, bouncing between alleyways and sidewalks as they’re smothered by the brick facade of the structures surrounding him; his pleas goes unanswered, leaving him utterly trapped, robbed of his freedom and with no means of alerting his family or his friends – hours away in Saratoga – of his plight. But he continues to make appeals to the deserted street, and as he does, the camera pans up, revealing that this heartbreaking display of hopelessness and isolation is unfolding…
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G-S-T Review…Charlie Countryman
Nobody can fault Charlie Countryman for a lack of trying, that’s for certain. They can, of course, fault it for being a schizophrenic and ultimately useless piece of cinema, but as I cringed at the lesser merits of Fredrik Bond’s debut film, I also found myself yearning to give the whole production an “A” for effort; for every one of Charlie Countryman‘s myriad failures, there’s a palpable sense that Bond and his cast – particularly leading man Shia LaBeouf, grown up and shockingly greasy from his stint as Neurotic Human Protagonist in the Transformers series – are striving for something in every scene. Exactly what they’re striving for could remain in contention for a good…
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Sweet Trailer…'Divergent'
Imagine this: it’s the distant future, and society has been divided into five separate factions, each of which represents one of humanity’s best traits. You’re born into either Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, or Erudite, and from that point on, you’re the embodiment of that one characteristic – until your sixteenth birthday, when you take an apparently government-mandated aptitude test that identifies which faction you fit into the best. Now imagine that the test fails, and you could fit into any number of factions. And that this particular quality – known as divergence – makes you a danger in the eyes of the powers that be. That’s the basic gist of…
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G-S-T TV: American Horror Story: Coven (3.2 – 3.5)
Let’s play catch-up with Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, shall we? In just a scant four episodes (maybe not so scant if Coven measures to the same length as its forebears in American Horror Story canon), Ryan Murphy has treated us to nearly as much weird sex, regional creepiness, and explicit gore as what Asylum offered viewers; this isn’t a season that’s had to struggle much to find any footing, even if the most recent episode felt a tad unfulfilling (Zoe’s delightful chainsaw rampage notwithstanding). That’s just what happens when you give your season a sense of balance instead of yanking it every which-way possible. So where are we, five weeks after…
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G-S-T Review…Diana
As a young lad, my measure of acquaintance with Diana, Princess of Wales started and stopped with the following details: she was British, beautiful, and a hair’s breadth from sainthood. Her death in 1997 meant little to me as a sheltered American boy, and only signified that the people I saw on television weren’t immune to harm or free from danger. The vulturous ethics of the paparazzi culture that was so thoroughly alien to my thirteen year old self, of course, has become much more familiar to me since, so today, at the very least, I can appreciate the cultural significance of her demise more than a decade and a…
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Sweet 2nd Trailer…'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug'
If you’re among those campaigning for studios to cut shorter trailers for their tentpole releases, then the newest trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug may cut harshly across your grain. At the same time, three minutes feels almost appropriate; Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth opuses never last less than two and a half hours, so perhaps there’s a sense of obligation to make promo footage for the picture feel proportionately epic in scope. Look at it this way, though – it only takes them less than a third of that time to work the title of the film into the mix! That’s probably small consolation. At any rate, The Hobbit: Hobbit…
