Delivery Man is a new movie starring Vince Vaughn as a middle aged slacker. For those of you familiar with Vince Vaughn’s work, you generally have a good idea of what to expect. Most of the time his movies are either hit or miss. He plays a very distinct slacker role in most of his films and this film is no different. The thing this movie has going for it, right out of the gate, is that it has a premise with depth and heart. Since this movie is coming out right before Thanksgiving, those are two good qualities to possess. But, are those two qualities enough to help this…
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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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G-S-T Review…The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Here we are with the second installment in the trilogy, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. This trilogy (well, three novels stretched out to four films) is the latest in the teen craze following on the heels of Harry Potter and Twilight and now The Hunger Games is taking its turn in the spotlight. Even with all of the success that the first movie saw, the studio was still not happy. New writers and a new director took the helm for this installment, but does that put the odds in the production’s favor and help take the series to the next level? In short, yes, in fact, with three fingers thrust…
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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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G-S-T Review…Thor: The Dark World
The terms and ideas surrounding a character like Marvel’s Thor (Odinsleep, bifrost, Yggdrasil, etc.) whether based on Norse mythology or not, are admittedly strange. Yet Thor (Chris Hemsworth) was kind enough to put it ever so simply in his 2011 film, “Your ancestors called it magic but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same“. Well if you found comfort in Kenneth Branagh’s Richard Donner-like origin story, Thor: The Dark World is like taking AP Calculus just when you think you’ve got the hang of your times tables. Not that Alan Taylor’s follow-up film is particularly smart (ambitious is more like it)…
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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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G-S-T Review…Ender's Game
We’re living in a time when the phrase “unfilmable novel” can no longer serve as an excuse for poor page-to-screen adaptations of quintessential stories on the receiving end of the Hollywood treatment. Over a decade ago, Peter Jackson shouldered the burden of that challenge by taking J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books and turning them into a trilogy of three hour and change films (or one ten hour film, depending on your perspective) whose joint success led to criminal cultural misuse of the word “epic”; nobody can so cavalierly write off their inept filmmaking based on a text’s inclination toward being transposed onto celluloid. It’s a blatant cop-out. Which…
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G-S-T Review…About Time
About Time‘s central romance doesn’t involve Rachel “Mean Girls” McAdams or Domhnall “Son of Brendan” Gleeson; the real lovers here are Richard Curtis and the tricky notion of time travel. How else to punch up a story that’s all about the rich existential rewards we reap from living a boring, ordinary life? Curtis employed the deceptive pleasures of coincidence to achieve the same effect in 2003’s Love Actually, though admittedly there’s nothing humdrum about the personal relationships of Prime Ministers and rock gods (or divine intervention, even if that never made the final cut). Here, he overturns a similar stone by using a far more incredible narrative tool for his…
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G-S-T Review…All Is Lost
Margin Call director, J.C. Chandor takes quite a different direction with this second film, All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford as a nameless man who is lost at sea and fighting for survival. Where as Margin Call was heavy with dialog, All Is Lost experiments with other forms of communication, from the sounds of nature to the thoughts inside the man’s head that we do not hear, but that we can imagine from the facial and physical queues Redford uses to portray them. At first this description might seem to recall the role of Tom Hanks in cast away Castaway, except Chandor’s and his crew faced the added challenge of…
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G-S-T Review…12 Years A Slave
Steve McQueen, to put it bluntly, makes bold movies. But really that’s still a gross understatement. In just his third feature film he tackles slavery – not an easy topic in the least. Even well respected and successful directors like Tarantino and Spielberg had nearly a dozen projects/films under their belt before taking on this subject or anything close to it. True, Tarantino’s Django Unchained was more a throwback to Peckinpah’s Westerns than an essay on slavery, but even the masterful Spielberg took some baby steps with films like The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun before tackling both Schindler’s List and Amistad. An up and coming filmmaker, McQueen is already…
