Tag: movies
Folksy ‘Pete’s Dragon’ charms with homespun feel
The original Pete’s Dragon was a 70s family musical produced by a different Disney in a different era, complete with singing villagers, a lighthouse, Helen Reddy and a cartoon gentle giant dragon spliced into the landscape of a live action film (taking a page from the Mary Poppins playbook). The film has a fan base…
Reviewing Shemi Zarhin’s The Kind Words: Is Perfection Enough?
How important is scope when determining a movie’s value? I am taunted by this question every time I get into an argument with someone over the relative worth of a virtually perfect smaller movie – say, The Full Monty – and a highly flawed, grand endeavour – say, Gangs of New York. At the risk…
Jason Bourne and everything that’s wrong with Hollywood today
The five biggest movies that opened in the USA in the last weekend of July, 2016 had the following Rotten Tomato scores: 76, 62, 58, 57, 50. For those of you who don’t know, RT considers a movie to be “Fresh” if it has 60 or higher, and “Rotten” is it falls under 60. So,…
A Tip for Film Writers: Always Be Writing
Many times I hear writers say they are stuck or are in a writer’s slump because no ideas are coming, or because they don’t know what to write. They want an original idea for a film that nobody has ever seen before. They want the next great original idea that rocks the film world. Some…
The Trotsky and Youths’ Red Life
The first time I watched The Trotsky (dir. Jacob Tierney) I was nineteen years old and had just finished participating in my local Occupy. Huddled underneath a blanket awkwardly wrapped around my body, there I sat in my unheated bedroom, a fierce winter wind howling just metres from my small cinema; though I was cold…