“War,” Edwin Starr famously wondered, “What is it good for?” I’ll tell you what it’s good for: War inspires art. Obviously, no one sane hankers for it, but without war our culture wouldn’t have Picasso’s “Guernica,” Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Springsteen’s “Lost in the Flood,” Altman’s “M*A*S*H” — I could totally cram this […]
Dayna Papaleo
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Film Review: “The Wolfpack”
In case there’s any doubt about how movies inform our worldview, here’s a random exchange I overheard at my job yesterday: “What’s a Hare Krishna?” “It’s those guys from f**kin’ ‘Airplane!’ with the shaved heads.” (Just ignore the superfluous cursing; I work in a restaurant kitchen.) Cultural references like that one aren’t an anomaly in […]
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Film Review: “Dope”
It’s said that there are only about seven different plots in storytelling, yet our unique perspectives have enabled scribes to recycle those same scenarios for thousands of years. So on the surface, there’s nothing particularly new or groundbreaking about writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s “Dope,” in which naïve young people come into possession of a pile of […]
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Film Review: “Results”
Your garden-variety romantic comedy is a nice girl, a nice guy, and, as Jane Austen once wrote of her characters, “after a little bit of trouble, all that they desire.” Everyone’s adorably quirky but no one’s overtly weird, even though humans are unquestionably strange. It’s surprising that not many filmmakers have the guts to craft […]
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Film Review: “I’ll See You in My Dreams”
It’s not a big mystery why Hollywood isn’t cranking out movies geared toward older audiences. Explosions and boobs make the studios piles of cash out of the gate and in the lucrative foreign markets, while chatty character pieces about those of a certain age play more effectively to English-speaking crowds and, thanks to buzz, typically […]
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Film Review: “Aloft”
It’s been 13 years since his breakthrough role in “28 Days Later,” and I firmly believe that Irish actor Cillian Murphy is not a big star by his own design. Murphy has the looks and the talent, but he seems to be one of those artists who does slam-dunks like Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy […]
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Film Review: “Entourage”
Raymond Chandler once wrote, “The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.” So please let that serve as my disclaimer for whatever happens next, because I’ve seen every episode of the HBO series “Entourage,” which ran for eight […]
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Treat me
It’s almost hard to believe that four years have flown by since Catelyn Augustine and Amber Odhner unleashed Eat Me Ice Cream on our city.
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Film Review: “Aloha”
Well, it has finally dawned on me that I might be in an abusive relationship with filmmaker Cameron Crowe. Things were just so good at the beginning, with “Say Anything…,” “Singles,” “Jerry Maguire,” and “Almost Famous,” all perfect in their own unique way yet thrumming with beautifully universal truths. But at the turn of the […]
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Film Review: “Maggie”
Hello, and welcome to another installment of “I Saw This Movie So You Don’t Have To!” Yes, “I Tilled Your Garden So You Don’t Have To” probably would have been much more helpful, but I figured I’d take one for the team and bear witness to the dull zombie drama “Maggie,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s crack at […]
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Film Review: “It’s All So Quiet”
The early scenes in Dutch filmmaker Nanouk Leopold’s “It’s All So Quiet” are unsparing in their depiction of caring for an elderly person no longer able to care for themselves. In Helmer’s case, however, as he painstakingly moves his father from the first floor to a second-floor bedroom, the entrenched passive-aggression is palpable, with far […]
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Film Review: “Far from the Madding Crowd”
“I’d hate to become some man’s property,” the forthright Bathsheba Everdene says to her gently spurned suitor. It’s 1870 in Dorset, England, and despite her penniless status, Bathsheba values her independence above everything, a nontraditional mindset that will serve her well when an unexpected inheritance bequeaths her a large farm. But over the course of […]
