DVD Releases for August 31, 2010
Posted on Sep 01, 2010 @ 10:47AM - Add a comment
Harry Brown (R)
DVD Releases for Tuesday, August 10
Posted on Aug 10, 2010 @ 05:53PM - Add a comment
Date Night (PG-13)
DVD Releases for May 25, 2010
Posted on May 25, 2010 @ 12:13PM - Add a comment
Dear John (PG-13)
It doesn’t take long for Channing Tatum’s shirt to come off in this romantic story of love, distance and roads not taken. Adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks -- also known as the man who brought us The Notebook and A Walk to Remember -- Dear John follows the trials and tribulations of a couple that keeps a long-distance romance alive through letters and imagination. While Channing’s character is off at war, his mellifluous lady of choice has some big choices to make of her own, and her decision impacts them both amid painful loss. (Channing Tatum [John Tyree], Amanda Seyfried [Savannah Curtis])
The Road (R)
Death, doom and yes, even cannibalism are in the depressing mix in this film about post-apocalyptic survival as only novelist Cormac McCarthy could imagine. Viggo Mortensen appropriately stars as a father who travels a ravaged America with his wife and young son, doing his best to keep them all alive and savoring each moment that his son’s heart is still beating. Of course, there are only two outcomes possible -- and in this landscape drawn in heart-chilling greys and dingy yellows, neither one is very appealing. (Viggo Mortensen [The Father], Charlize Theron [The Mother])
Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman (Not Rated)
Who is Julius Shulman? According to this 2008 documentary, the late architectural photographer was one of the godfathers of American modernism, and his influence places him in pantheon of visionaries that includes titans like Frank Gehry, Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler. Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, Visual Acoustics introduces Shulman to us laypeople, and shows how his vision for space and design impacts everyday life, whether we realize it or not. (Dustin Hoffman [Himself, Narrator], Tom Ford [Himself], Kelly Lynch [Herself])
Movie Review: Harry Brown
Posted on Apr 30, 2010 @ 08:03PM - Add a comment
A young mother is shot in broad daylight by a bunch of teens joy-riding in a suburban park. She moans and crumples to the ground, becoming a heap beside a stroller that holds her infant child. The teens shoot a few more bullets into her body before riding away on a scooter, hollering and shooting more rounds.
Visceral and unsettling, the gruesome opening act sets the mood for the rest of Harry Brown, a bleak British export that makes its U.S. debut on Friday. The film stars Michael Caine in the title role as a retiree who decides to take matters into his own hands when the local thugs push him one step too far. With its elder-in-arms and violent, misguided youths, Harry Brown has drawn comparisons to Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, in which an elderly man stands up to the Asian-American gang-bangers in his Chicago ‘hood. Both Caine and director Michael Barber have bristled at that facile analogy, and with good reason: Brown is more akin to Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning war film The Hurt Locker than to Eastwood’s generational love-fest. Where Torino explores race, violence and culture in America, Hurt Locker explores the nature of and addiction to violence itself, albeit wrapped in the legally-sanctioned packaging of war.
Iron Man 2
In Harry Brown’s concrete-bound neighborhood, the grip of law has slipped entirely. There are no rules or boundaries or even the most basic respect for human life. And don’t even think about inter-generational, multi-cultural family parties. Where Torino’s Walt (Eastwood) gets to know his interloping neighbors at a festive gathering, Harry is completely isolated, without friends or family -- forget about homemade Vietnamese pastries. The contrast between this gritty, lawless reality and the sugar-coated perception of London law enforcement is agonizingly etched through misguided, ineffectual police efforts designed for maximum political benefit more than actual results. The ivory-tower problem reaches its most glaring apex in a coordinated police raid that explodes into a wild riot. Like a match dropping onto a dry tinderbox, the streets suddenly burn with rage and fiery cars alike, turning the neighborhood into what looks like a war zone.
Robert Downey Jr “This Time It’s Personal”
While Harry’s vengeance-and-fury fueled journey reveals the darkest corners of the thugs’ lairs, it’s the crime-fighting efforts of D.I. Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer) that reveals what’s going on in ineffectual-central. Frampton’s job is trying and her superiors ignore her, but she’s the only one besides Harry to seems to get what’s actually going on. Far from cliched cop roles, Mortimer allows Frampton to be tough as nails but human, too. She stands up to the foul-mouthed kingpin, but also mourns Harry’s losses and stands in for the proverbial good cops whose hearts are in the right place, but whose leverage is lost amid departmental agendas.
Video Parody of Iron Man 2
Harry Brown opened at number three at the U.K. box office last fall, becoming a hot button for politics there, particularly because it’s an election year. Harry Brown will likely not have as much immediate relevance here, laregly because American gang violence tends to be equated with race issues more than those of class. Harry Brown’s villains are mostly Caucasian, but they’re uneducated, unloved and lacking any tethers to society. Brown is also simply difficult to watch at times. Just because the violence isn’t gratuitous, it’s not any easier to look at.
New Movies:
It’s that difficulty and that raw violence that makes Harry Brown so exceptional. Taut, challenging and riveting, its power lies in its unapologetically brutal violence that lacks a musical score, slow motion or anything else that might glamorize what’s going on. A constant threat of danger hovers at the edges of the story at all times, mimicking the ever-lurking hazards of Harry’s world. Far from feeling irrelevant on Yankee turf, it’s an eye-opening, cautionary tale that warns of a lost generation that, by some accounts, is already a reality in Britain -- and could well become one for us.
