Ever since Sam Kinison used the term “courtesy laugh,” I’ve been careful to keep track of films that actually deliver at least a little honest comedy, and while Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent isn’t fall on the floor stuff, there’s something sweet and honest about the thing. In the grumpy-old-man, get-off-my-lawn category this delivers. I find myself..
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Drinking Buddies (2013) Kate (Olivia Wild) is what you might call the hospitality girl for a brand new Chicago brewery. She introduces the brew to bar and restaurant owners, and she’s the prettiest, and only, girl in the small company’s employ. She dates music producer Chris (Ron Livingston, Band of Brothers), and this relationship appears..
The Undateable We don’t come by honesty naturally. If we aren’t born liars, we learn exactly what people want to hear very early on, and we spend much of our lives floating partial truth trial balloons. If our friends and loved ones shoot those down, we go back to managing our fictional version of self…
Something is wrong with me. I liked all of these films. Mini-Reviews: Angels’ Share • Red Corner • Eden Angels’ Share (2012) It bothers me that Netflix doesn’t have a “UK Tall Tales from the Pub” category. You know: Waking Ned Devine, Brassed Off, The Stone of Destiny. I just love this stuff — Jolly old..
Stolen Lives (2009) If the people who make Hallmark television movies ever decided to spice things up with a lingering, forensic eye on dead bodies and a little Morena Baccarin porch humping, it might look something like this curiously lifeless crime drama, which really should have its own caution tape wrapped around it. It features a..
Wish You Were Here (2012) I have a weakness for movies about western couples who visit some exotic third world hell hole and wonder what in the world they were thinking when they planned the trip. Moral of the story: stay away from Cambodia. This was extremely well executed, with incredible performances by Joel Edgerton..
Some films almost feel as though they deserve a workshop over a review, and Touchy Feely–with its invitation to participate in painfully awkward, claustrophobic family conversations and vast stretches of unexplained premise–certainly qualifies. You don’t wait 20 minutes to understand the story here. You get to wait forever. Directed by Lynn Shelton, Rosemary DeWitt..
I find it oddly soothing to recreate memories from the thin little strands we have left of them in our minds. I’ve had to braid in a little new material here and there, imagine plausible dialogue, but the nucleus of the weave is usually pretty solid. Things that happen to us when we’re small, and..
The Responsibility Divide When a parent is pushed to the extreme by a rebellious teenager and a full-blown, high-volume lecture erupts, I’ve noticed the reaction of the troubled teen falls along a spectrum. The teen will either fight back and make the yelling match more or less even, or they will fall into a kind..
..and mistaking them for people.. A “cog,” they tell us, is a motion-transferring wheel with sprockets along its edge. A collection of them, engineered and assembled, as in a Swiss watch, can be so beautiful to behold that some designers have taken to leaving the whole assembly visible to the eye. It’s reassuring to ponder..