War Cry

-
Though I was a fan of Boys Don't Cry, as much as I wanted to like Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss I just couldn't.  The best film about the war in Iraq is, I think, as yet unmade.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Freaks and Geeks: Comic Con Episode IV Offers a Heartwarming Look at a Nerd's Paradise

-
Image
 With so much of American life centered on celebrity worship and aspirational window shopping, it is nice to be reminded of the merits of the not-beautiful, the marginal, and, frankly, the geeky. Morgan Spurlock's new documentary Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope is a salute to the underdogs in life's lotto, the kids who didn't get all the lucky breaks and the good looks. But, based on this documentary, they at least wring their fair share of fun from it nevertheless. Their nirvana is the annual comic book convention in San Diego, Comic-Con. Inaugurated in 1970, the event has since grown into an enormous, celebrity-packed merchandise-shilling geek fest of 120,000 fanboys and girls that nerds across the country pine to attend all year long. In a tongue-in-cheek opening bit mimicking an old-school filmstrip, Spurlock shows the crude beginnings of Comic-Con in black-and-white stills of fuzzy-h...
Read more

A Dark Coming-of-Age Story for Girls

-
Image
Sidney Flanigan in Never Rarely Sometimes Always /Image courtesy of Focus Features Tales of innocence lost and knowledge gained, the male bildungsroman in film runs the tonal gamut from American Graffiti t o Stand By Me to Boyhood . It's an adventure story coupled with a rite of passage that signals a shift from childhood to manhood. Director Eliza Hittman's devastating Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a coming-of-age with a difference, an "adventure" defined by a quest, myriad obstacles and a fresh, painful reckoning with the world's injustices, for both protagonist and audience. The quest in this case is 17-year-old Autumn's (Sidney Flanigan) herculean effort to obtain an abortion following sex, the film insinuates, that may not have been her choice. The film's title comes from an interview in a New York City Planned Parenthood office in which Autumn is asked to, essentially, recount her sex life on a rating scale from good to horrific a...
Read more

Girls Will Be Girls: Damsels in Distress Navel-Gazes at an Artificial College Experience

-
Image
Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics Whit Stillman's flowery, absurd Damsels in Distress substitutes Animal House 's crude frat boys for priss-pot coeds in this too-cute-for-school, obnoxious evocation of a make-believe college life. The damsels in question are all named for flowers, because girls are so, well, flowery. Block-of-wood indie queen Greta Gerwig is all square shoulders and flatline delivery as the bossypants Violet, the queen bee in a hive of girliness dedicated to rooting out bad smells and suicidal depression from their private Seven Oaks College. The slightly dim brunette Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and the elegant African-American girl Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who has come back from a London trip with an affected British accent and a conviction that all men are "playboys and operators," round out this coterie of Lanz nightgowns and proper enunciation. The girls live in a cozy dorm room...
Read more