REVIEW: Home [2015]

“I’m the interrupting cow! Moo!” While it didn’t need help on its way to a fifty million dollar opening weekend, Home may have benefited from a G-rating. Its journey in search of family taken by Oh the Boov (Jim Parsons) and Tip the Human (Rihanna) skews very young in message and comedic style—unexpectedly so for me. So sweetly cute, it’s hard to think many children of PG-viewing age would find worth considering it’s slightly more juvenile than they’d admit is ‘cool’ in the presence of their peers. Only once they’ve…

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REVIEW: Gone in Sixty Seconds [2000]

“Two Rogers don’t make a right” There are more than a few unexpected things concerning the Gone in Sixty Seconds remake that surprised me. One was the huge cast of familiar faces. Another the full embracement of its spectacular levels of cheese. And despite marketing materials and especially the poster, Angelina Jolie is far from a second lead and barely onscreen thirty minutes. Heck, besides the botched heist at the beginning that sets the chain of events that brings Randall ‘Memphis’ Raines (Nicolas Cage) out of retirement in motion, we…

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REVIEW: The Last Time You Had Fun [2015]

“You want to throw me a divorce party?” After watching the trailer and reading the synopsis, it’s hard not to see The Last Time You Had Fun in a sort of “been there, done that” light. We’ve seen it before countless times—that meet-cute of thirty-somethings at known and unknown crossroads in their lives letting loose and facing the consequences. The fact that Hal Haberman‘s script goes to generically broad places as far as why each of his foursome is caught in the doldrums that they are should make you feel…

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REVIEW: Buffalo ’66 [1998]

“Just look like we are a married couple … spanning time” In 2004 Christina Ricci was quoted in Time Out magazine as saying, “Buffalo ’66 was the most beautiful example of self-absorption I’ve ever seen in my life.” She’s not wrong. Even if she had a good experience on set and didn’t loathe writer/director/star Vincent Gallo like most involved on the film, she’d still not be wrong. Gallo’s character Billy Brown is the epitome of self-centered aggression mixed with an absolute lack of self-esteem—a description that describes Buffalo, NY in…

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INTERVIEW: Aaron Moorhead, director/cinematographer & Justin Benson director/writer of Spring

Sometimes the festival experience has a way of making you overrate films. The excitement of seeing things early with like-minded individuals, listening to filmmakers talk before and after their screenings, and the general festival aura are hard to separate from the work itself. So I won’t lie and say I didn’t re-watch Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson‘s Spring—my favorite of TIFF 2014—with a little trepidation in case the memory proved grander than reality. 109-minutes later, however, I realized I might have actually underrated it. This supernatural, sci-fi, horror, romantic drama…

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