Articles tagged with: heroes
Cinema and Television, October 2009 »
The Cove’s obsession with its own heroics is its most fundamental flaw. A desperate plea to emotion and irrationality, this crowd-pleasing documentary is a facile, ill-conceived piece of agitprop that may end up doing more harm than good to the cause of conservation.
Cinema and Television, July 2009 »
Some stories are rather simple; they can be reduced to a symbiotic dichotomy. Life and death. Cops and robbers. Men of action, defined by their chosen profession, who live by the gun and die by the gun. Michael Mann’s Public Enemies follows in the reductionist vein of his last several films, finding a myriad of intersections between oppositional — and codependent — forces of self-identity. Public Enemies may be Mann’s most schematic film to date — a study in contrasts, gilded by period detail and graced by the presence of two of the most dynamic leading men in show business, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.
Cinema and Television, March 2009 »
Seriously, my world just turned upside down.
Early in the year I forced myself to sit through Christopher Nolan’s painful but much hyped follow-up to the dreadfully mediocre Batman Begins. You know Christopher Nolan, the guy who made the brilliant and ambitious movie, Memento, following it with one of the decade’s smartest American movies, The Prestige. As a Batman fan, sitting through The Dark Knight was a physically painful affair: dire, clichéd rubbish, an overly traditional man vs terrorist setup soaked to the brim in an unquestioning philosophy a mile or …
Cinema and Television, March 2009 »
A surprisingly sturdy, mildly provocative 105 minute movie is hiding somewhere in Watchmen’s gangly two and three-quarter hours running time. Dense with shockingly unnecessary exposition, this story about the nature of heroism and identity indulges in a great deal of introspective character study between bouts of flamboyant brutality and fleeting moments where director Zack Snyder’s technical prowess and filmmaking ambition coincide. As a messy, sprawling adaptation, the product of marketing, focus-testing, and the instincts of a young would-be visionary still learning his craft, the inchoate professionalism of the production serves the film’s gargantuan ambitions and readymade stature, rather than completely defeating it. From the perspective of the film’s own history, it is a miracle that it got made at all.
Cinema and Television, February 2009 »
Original illustration by Michael Sean Hansen.
“It a choice, Wesley, that each of us must face: to remain ordinary, pathetic, beat-down, coasting through a miserable existence, like sheep herded by fate – or you can take control of your own destiny and join us, releasing the caged wolf you have inside. Our purpose is to maintain stability in an unstable world – kill one, save a thousand. Within the fabric of this world, every life hangs by a thread. We are that thread – a fraternity of assassins with the weapons …
