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(09/21/14 7:43pm)
Imagine hiking for the first time, with a backpack equaling you in weight, being afraid of the wilderness and leaving your home behind. This sounds like the worst Dartmouth Outing Club first-year trip ever, or the premise of Jean-Marc Vallée’s latest film, “Wild” (2014). If there was a theme at last year’s Telluride Film Festival, it was the survival tale, captured in big hits like “All Is Lost,” “Gravity” and “Tracks.” Adapting Cheryl Strayed’s national bestselling autobiography “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” Vallée rides this wave of survivalist success.
(09/14/14 8:33pm)
“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/Seem to me all the uses of this world!”
(08/25/14 10:22pm)
In 2003, James Frey published “A Million Little Pieces,” a gruesome memoir chronicling his rehabilitation from drug and alcohol abuse. It was picked up by Oprah’s Book Club, and held the New York Times bestseller spot for 15 weeks. It was later deemed a literary fraud, accused of embellishment and fabrication. “Confessions of a Ivy League Frat Boy,” written by Andrew Lohse ’12, could perhaps share this fate.
(08/18/14 10:36pm)
Watching Richard Linklater’s watershed film “Boyhood” (2014) feels like opening a long-forgotten, cobwebbed trunk full of old photos, Pokémon cards and Nintendo games you discovered in your attic. Following the growth of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from age 6 to 18, the film captures the midnight Harry Potter book releases, the Britney Spears songs and the Razr phones vital to the childhoods of Generation Y. On the way, the film wins viewers over with its honest, moving depiction of the trials and tribulations of growing up.
(08/11/14 7:42pm)
It was sobering experience to sit in a quiet theater and watch as Philip Seymour Hoffman became the beleaguered, chain smoking spy Günther Bachmann in Anton Corbijn’s “A Most Wanted Man” (2014). This film was Hoffman’s final leading role before his tragic death earlier this year, the result of a cocktail of heroin, cocaine and prescription medications. A haunted yet brilliant actor who brought some of film’s most iconic characters to life, such as Truman Capote in “Capote”(2005) and Caden Cotard in “Synecdoche, New York” (2008), Hoffman struggled with drug abuse and alcoholism throughout his life. “A Most Wanted Man” is Hoffman’s swan song, and in its eerie proximity to his own life, the film provides a window into the freighted, enervated and tailspinning psyche of one of our generation’s greatest talents.
(08/08/14 1:45pm)
Tis swillig, and the soused did glut themselves in the keel
(08/04/14 11:17pm)
Most of you know Zach Braff as the goofy, daydreaming doctor from “Scrubs,” capable of transitioning from playing the eagle-playing goof to a teary-eyed sentimentalist in a heartbeat. He brought this sad clown effect to Andrew Largeman, the despondent lead character of his 2004 self-directed indie hit “Garden State.” His second feature “Wish I Was Here” (2014) — which he directed as well as stars in — exists in the same angsty universe, enlivened only by its own dark humor and bizarre coterie of characters.
(07/28/14 6:13pm)
It’s unfortunate that I watched this film right after seeing “Particle Fever” (2013) at the Loew Theater Friday night. The film is a beautiful homage to being human and the wonders of knowledge, and Luc Besson’s “Lucy” (2014) had the same intentions. A question and answer bookend the film: “Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?” followed by “Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it.” But along the way, it tailspins into absurdity and misanthropy, reducing mankind to an animalistic species scrambling with its head chopped off.
(07/21/14 7:15pm)
If you’ve ever watched a cooking program like “Iron Chef America” or “Chopped” on an empty stomach, you know that feeling of painful, mouthwatering food lust. Anacharsis, an ancient Scythian philosopher said, “The vine bears three kinds of grapes: the first of pleasure, the second of intoxication, the third of disgust.” The metaphor works well for this film. The first shot of juicy limes delights you, the second shot of bubbling grilled cheese intoxicates you and the third shot of crackling bacon makes you bite your fist, whimper and wonder how moving pictures can be so cruel.
(07/14/14 10:07pm)
If you took Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” shoved everyone onto a post-apocalyptic Noah’s Ark and added a heaping spoonful of slow-mo, you would get Bong Joon-ho’s “Snowpiercer” (2013). The movie, based on the 1982 French graphic novel “Le Transperceneige,” is itself an ark of sorts that rescues audiences from the flood of cookie-cutter summer blockbusters like “The Expendables 3” and “Transformers 4,” which seem hell-bent on cashing in on formulaic premises. In “Snowpiercer,” Bong takes the overworked, steampunk, dystopic future tale and gives it an oil change.
(07/07/14 8:04pm)
How do you make an abortion funny? In this age of political correctness and verbal thin ice, director Gillian Robespierre’s 2014 crass, honest romantic comedy, “Obvious Child,” is a breath of fresh air that answers this question.
(06/30/14 9:13pm)
Cinematic adaptations of musicals face an inherent problem. Musicals are both more alive, and more importantly, theatrical than film, which creates a surreal universe in which flashy, spontaneous song-and-dance routines are permitted and logical. For this to hold true, audiences must immediately suspend their disbelief, permitting their over-the-top dramatic elements.
(06/23/14 9:16pm)
The 2014 reimagining of the 1959 Disney classic “Sleeping Beauty” begins with a sweeping helicopter shot over the vast kingdoms of the humans and the Moors, beautifully wrought with towering mountains, glittering streams and idyllic pastures.