Visceral is the word.
The Hurt Locker is about Iraq, and about men, and about war. It is certainly the most heralded film to emerge from the conflict. The plot centers on William James (Jeremy Renner). His rank: Sergeant First Class, US Army. His addiction: taking bombs apart. When James takes charge of a bomb-disposal squad, Bravo Company, he finds that the troops take issue with his methods. The newly anointed head man is a renegade to the rulebook. He seeks out fresh explosives to dismantle with a fearsome urgency, hunting them wherever they may be. All the while, James keeps count of successful disarmaments, the number whizzing steadily upward. Bravo Company lives in fear for unnecessary casualties on the heels of their leader’s relentless bomb-sniffing.
Director Kathryn Bigelow focuses in on the view of war espoused by writers like Chris Hedges. Her film highlights a quote of Hedges’: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” [click to continue…]
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Kathryn Bigelow,
The Hurt Locker
The Basterds are merciless.
Inglourious Basterds (2009) is Quentin Tarantino’s sauerkraut Western. Rather than the spaghetti scenery of conventional Westerns, we have WWII scenery. A much-revised WWII. In Tarantino’s war, the Basterds are a band of Jewish-American soldiers deep behind enemy lines. Their leader is Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). Their goal: to terrorize the Nazis the same way the Nazis terrorized Europe. Raine orders his men to scalp a hundred Nazis each. And to relish doing so. (They will even get a stab at Hitler.) [click to continue…]
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Inglourious Basterds,
Quentin Tarantino
500 Days of Summer (2009) is as warm and tantalizing as the season that it takes its name from. And just like the finest season, you’ll treasure it as a rose-palette recollection. The flick mixes rapture and melancholy with a light heart.
500 Days of Summer, directed by Marc Webb, features Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) recounting his five-hundred-day relationship with the wonderfully whimsical Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). The film opens with a narrator’s voice-over: “This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know upfront, this is not a love story.” No, Tom and Summer are not dating. They do everything that couples do, but a couple they are not. Their conflict is a matter of perception – and Webb’s movie is about perception. Men and women simply see the same things differently. [click to continue…]
Gotham City Improv‘s Off the Top of Our Heads show delivers spontaneity that would be calamitous in life. Here on the stage, it’s hilarity. The downtown troupe specializes in one thing: inducing outsized belly laughs on economy-sized ticket prices.
Several taboos are tossed out the window here. This is comedy and theater and few holds are barred. [click to continue…]
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Gotham City Improv
Disguised as a two-for-one musical biography, Tin Pan Alley Rag deepens as it lengthens. The show revolves around a dreamed-up encounter between two of America’s very real great composers: Messrs. Irving Berlin and Scott Joplin. In some ways, the meeting transpires like you might expect. The two great men recount the details of unlikely rises, the backstory on revolutionary musical hits, and the pain of loss that nothing can reverse. This is a tale of the highs and the lows that make any brilliant career worth telling about.
What changes the situation is the fact that Joplin (Boatman) needs something from Berlin (Therriault). After taking the musical world by storm and accomplishing greatness, he wishes for more. Rather than continue to write ragtime, he wishes to evolve his own beast. Joplin writes an African-American opera. And he wants Mr. Berlin to back its staging. Nobody else will, but Joplin needs to see the project realized to honor his late wife, who he loved beyond all reason. [click to continue…]
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Roundabout Theater Company,
Teen Reviewers and Critics
$5 Tickets
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