Author: Simon Hardy Butler
Oscars, Schmoscars: Why I’m Boycotting This Show on TV in 2015
I refuse to watch the Academy Awards next year. That’s right. I’m unofficially boycotting it. When it comes on TV, I’m gonna change the channel. Maybe watch Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). Or a cooking show. Just not the annual debacle that is the Oscars. Why am I so adamant? Well, I’ll tell ya.…
Novel Choices: 4 Classic Books That Should Be Made Into Movies
Sometimes I wonder if the movie industry has a small box containing only 10 or so classic novels, from which they draw periodically to craft prestige pictures. Case in point: Come 2015, we’ll be getting a new version of the Thomas Hardy classic Far from the Madding Crowd … despite the fact that an excellent,…
Truth and Moviemaking: Why Jon Stewart’s ‘Rosewater’ Doesn’t Work
A compelling story doesn’t necessarily make for a compelling movie. Such is the case with Rosewater (2014), Jon Stewart’s tedious, heavy-handed film documenting the harrowing detainment and torture of a Newsweek journalist during the tumult surrounding the Iranian presidential elections in 2009. The picture, based on a true story detailed in a book by Maziar…
More Sleaze, if You Please: ‘Nightcrawler’ Takes TV to Task
Satire has got to be one of the hardest things to do right – especially when it comes to films about the TV industry. They can either be ferocious and telling, as Network (1976) is, or dismal and ludicrous, which is how To Die For (1995) turned out. The world of television is such an…
Living on the Edge: ‘The Last Patrol’ Offers a Sobering Post-War Trip
It’s hard to call Sebastian Junger’s compelling new documentary, The Last Patrol (2014), an anti-war film … or, for that matter, a pro-war movie. That’s in part because this picture, which kicked off the American Museum of Natural History’s Margaret Mead Film Festival Thursday night, is too textured to peg in a specific hole. The…