Tags: Culture of Death
B- |
**½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
October Baby is at its most thoughtful contemplating Hannah’s unresolved feelings about her biological mother and the tragic way that her life began. She may not find the missing piece of her life she was looking for, but she unexpectedly finds another missing piece instead: one that, in a way, could explain the undefined sense of loss in her life.
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B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Suzanne Collins says she got the idea for
The Hunger Games while sleepily flicking channels between some reality-show game and footage of the invasion of Iraq until the images began to blur in her mind. What’s bracing about Gary Ross’ film of the first book in Collins’ wildly popular young-adult trilogy is that the topicality of the story’s origins still comes across. When was the last Hollywood science-fiction action blockbuster that felt like actual ideas about the world we live in were at stake?
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F |
* |
-3|
Adults*
The shocking thing about
Sanctum’s fictional survival story, relocated to Papua New Guinea, is not that it kills off one expedition member after another, often quite brutally. The shocking thing is how callously it treats their lives. More than one team member is
euthanized by his fellows, submerged and drowned after sustaining catastrophic injuries.
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D- |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
The Switch is about an attractive woman in her early 40’s with a history of unfortunate relationships and a gnawing concern that she’s been hitting the snooze button on her biological alarm clock for too long. I can’t imagine why they cast Jennifer Aniston.
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The celebratory media frenzy over the 50th anniversary of The Pill has reached even the pages of
Variety, where past editor and current vice president and editorial director Peter Bart has written a strange essay called “
‘Sex’ and the summer franchise” (subscription required) that somehow contrives to link a blip in summer movie patterns to five decades of contraception.
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A- |
***½ |
+2-2|
Adults*
C. S. Lewis’s bleak prediction about human mistreatment of extraterrestrial creatures was framed in terms of human spacefarers encountering alien life on distant worlds, but the gist of his thesis is eminently applicable to the scenario proposed in
District 9, a caustic and gory but sharply made sci-fi fable with a pungent South African flavor.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
There’s an ambitious modesty to Duncan Jones’s debut film
Moon, a smart, existential science-fiction drama with one onscreen actor that runs 97 minutes and goes nowhere more exotic than our planet’s natural satellite.
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F |
***½ |
-4|
In the end, in its easygoing, nonpolemical way,
Brokeback Mountain is nothing less than an indictment not just of heterosexism but of masculinity itself.
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F |
*** |
-4|
No One
By the film’s end, Frankie is faced with a choice that the
priest says could lead to his damnation. The film makes the wrong
choice seem right. But it leaves it an open question, I think,
whether making that choice leads to redemption or damnation.
Million Dollar Baby suggests, perhaps, that the right and
most loving thing to do for someone else may entail one’s own
damnation. This is very far from good way of looking at things.
But it suggests a film that is less complacent, more thoughtful,
less like smug propaganda than some of its detractors allege.
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F |
½ |
-4|
No One
The life and work of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the
Indiana University entomologist turned pioneering sexologist, has
provoked accounts and interpretations as divergent, and as
bitterly contested, as John Kerry’s Vietnam service in the last
election. And, while it’s true that Kinsey’s work warrants such
scrutiny, it’s also true that this only makes the task of weeding
through the arguments more daunting.
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F |
***½ |
-4|
The Cell gives imaginative and
visual shape to as it were the very soul of misogynism,
perversion, depravity, sadism, and the supreme nihilism and
egotism of the damned. The film also has some images of beauty,
peace, and serenity; even some Christian symbolism — but all this
is quickly overwhelmed, even betrayed and subverted, so that the
dark themes dominate the film.
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F |
**½ |
-3|
The film’s central conceit is that the process of colorization
is spread through acts of exploration or self-discovery by which
people step outside their customary ways into a new world. In the
black-and-white world of the 1950s TV sitcom, one common means of
transformation is sexual activity, which didn’t exist in
"Pleasantville" until the teenagers (Jennifer in particular)
introduced it. When Jennifer gently explains the facts of life to
her sitcom mother (Joan Allen), the latter is certain that her
prosaic husband (William H. Macy) could never be induced to
engage in such activity; so Jennifer proceeds to coach her mother
(offscreen) on how to commit self-abuse. The mother then proceeds
to do so, with such explosive results that by a kind of
sympathetic magic the tree in the front yard bursts into
flame.
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