If you’ve ever talked to me about the weather, you probably know that I’m a big fan of cold and snow. Not to the point where I prefer the bitter months of the year to the fruitful days of summer; in point of fact, every season, be it warm or chilly, has its merits in my book, and one of the best parts of living in New England lies in getting the full spectrum of changing climates for every annual quarter. That means there’s always something to look forward to, unless you’re one of those who prefers to hibernate in the winter rather than strap yourself to a snowboard and…
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G-S-T Review…The Punk Singer
Sini Anderson’s The Punk Singer is a double-sided coin, with one face that’s somber and another that’s uplifting. Watching the film’s subject, feminist activist and musician Kathleen Hanna, as she takes center stage in archive footage, it’s impossible not to feel inspired by her energy and indomitability; for most of the film, Hanna gives the impression of being an unstoppable force, though anyone familiar with her life and times already knows this to be untrue without having to watch the entire picture. And so The Punk Singer exists as a work that’s simultaneously joyful and tragic, though that contradiction only makes Anderson’s film feel even more transparent and honest. For…
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G-S-T Review…Out of the Furnace
You can take the Oscar bait out of the gritty revenge thriller, but you can’t take the gritty revenge thriller out of the Oscar bait. So goes Out of the Furnace, Scott Cooper’s latest film since 2009’s deplorably hackneyed Crazy Heart; in just under two hours of running time, Cooper never makes the effort to determine whether he’s making a sweeping, important piece of arthouse cinema, or a good old fashioned genre picture. Truthfully, that’s by design – he’s very clearly bent on mashing these two pursuits together from the very start, hoping that by adding two and two he’ll come out the other side with a handsome bit of…
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G-S-T Review…The Great Beauty
Maybe the most impressive feat Paulo Sorrentino pulls off with The Great Beauty is one of restraint; in two hours and twenty minutes, not a single reference is made to the man whose actions most strongly inform the backdrop of the Italian filmmaker’s latest picture. That would be Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s erstwhile prime minister and unapologetic career scoundrel, whose bunga bunga stink wafts through every orgiastic party Sorrentino stages throughout his exquisitely crafted film. But that just speaks to the lasting impact Berlusconi’s negligence and corruption have had on Italian society since his resignation in 2011; no one need mention his name to invoke his presence. He’s a specter looming…
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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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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…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…The Fifth Estate
Here’s the big question hanging over the head of The Fifth Estate: do we contextualize it based on content or structure? Bill Condon’s first post-Twilight film bites off more than it can chew, but it’s difficult to say whether that’s because of the subject matter – being the origins and rise of both Wikileaks and its controversial founder, Julian Assange – or because of the production’s unavoidable biopic bent; even at the tender age of only seven (which amounts to light years on the web), Wikileaks can already claim a rich, storied, complex history, so much so that two hours feels scarcely enough to scratch the surface of its conception…
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G-S-T Review…Gravity
The written word is a poor medium for articulating Gravity‘s many wondrous qualities neatly and efficiently; more than any other film released in 2013, this one – hailing from virtuoso Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron seven years after the monumental Children of Men – may be best described as an experience. That’s a pretty way of saying that Gravity demands to be seen in a properly calibrated theater, which is itself a passive aggressive, mildly pleading clarion call for all bored moviegoers to bum rush their local multiplexes and ruthlessly run box offices out of tickets stubs for the picture. More so than other mainstream contemporary spectacles, the film must be…