REVIEW: Silence [2016]

“An army of two” A labor of love twenty-five years in the making, Silence is tailor-made for Martin Scorsese‘s sensibilities as a person and director. Not only does it comment on faith and therefore his personal struggles being someone who contemplated going down the road towards priesthood, it also provides similar subject matter and plot progression to his most famous religion-based drama The Last Temptation of Christ. This epic journey is ostensibly the last temptation of Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), a Jesuit priest striving to cultivate Catholicism in Japan at…

Read More

REVIEW: The Story of 90 Coins [2015]

“I will prove my love and determination to you” Here’s an interesting film that’s beautiful to look at and well acted, but built on a story steeped in a notion the twenty first century doesn’t and shouldn’t accept. It could be a lost in translation situation wherein gender roles and patriarchal ideals remain stuck in an archaic past within China, but I have a fundamental issue with how Bai Xuedan‘s script The Story of 90 Coins presents its central conflict. Liwei Jian shoots it with skill, Michael Wong directs with…

Read More

REVIEW: Gary From Accounting [2016]

“I think I left my oven on so I’m going to …” Drinking problems are a serious matter. Alcoholics neglect their families, careers, and their own health as they walk through life in a haze towards their next glass. It’s hard to reach someone suffering from this disease without the cold hard truth. So you stage an intervention to facilitate your laying everything out. “This is how your actions affect me—him, her, and you.” The hope is that this bombardment of emotions and love can jolt someone out of his/her…

Read More

REVIEW: Saving Banksy [2017]

“The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist—unless it makes a profit” I love Banksy‘s work most because of how it comments on the commodification of art. Here’s a world-renowned master who refuses to authenticate anything he’s done on the street—his canvas of choice. He does this as a stand for the form, for what graffiti has always been. The pieces he stencils are site-specific both in the sense of the wall and the country for which he’s commenting politically.…

Read More

REVIEW: The Bye Bye Man [2017]

“Don’t think it. Don’t say it.” A horror movie slated to open in October means buzz and solid expectations. It used to be you didn’t see the genre at any other time—back before studios discovered how cheap they were to produce and how palatable they were to teens looking for something to do on a Friday night whether it proved enjoyably worthwhile or not. Securing this coveted spot was therefore a win for STX Entertainment and their film The Bye Bye Man, either through hard work or sheer luck. Watching…

Read More

REVIEW: Live By Night [2016]

“We don’t get to pick our sins” A scene happens early on in Live by Night where Deputy Police Captain Thomas Coughlin (Brendan Gleeson) tells his criminal son Joe (Ben Affleck) that our actions always add up to a conclusion for which we can never predict. The idea is that Joe is a good man—a war veteran with a good heart—who’s simply been disillusioned. Thomas is willing to not crackdown on him despite being fully aware of how his boy makes a living as long as the evidence doesn’t force…

Read More

REVIEW: 君の名は。 [Kimi no na wa.] [Your Name.] [2016]

“That day when the stars came falling” I had no idea what to expect upon sitting down to 君の名は。[Kimi no na wa.] [Your Name.] and the first few minutes definitely had my head spinning. We’re ushered in via the voiceover narration of two high schoolers we’ve yet to properly meet in Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi) and Taki (Ryûnosuke Kamiki). They speak about dreams as a rare comet shoots across the blue sky. It’s cryptic, beautiful, and utterly fascinating—a subdued tone easing us in before a kinetic collage of vignettes without context…

Read More

REVIEW: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [2016]

“Rebellions are built on hope” George Lucas used to say years ago that the original Star Wars trilogy was but three chapters of an epic nine-part saga. It dealt with the Skywalker family, beginning in the middle to introduce a passing of the “Force” from father to son. Lucas would eventually make the first three chapters as a prequel series used to tell the tale of Anakin Skywalker’s descent towards the Dark Side for exposition into the stunning reveal his becoming Luke and Leia’s formidable foe in A New Hope…

Read More

REVIEW: Die Hard [1988]

“Make fists with your toes” It’s become such an action classic with numerous sequels, copycats, and homages and yet Die Hard as we know it almost never was—by choice. Novelist Roderick Thorp wrote Nothing Lasts Forever, his follow-up to The Detective, thirteen years after the original because he saw The Towering Inferno and dreamt up an idea of one man in a skyscraper hunted by terrorists. It starred his NYPD Detective Joe Leland, now aged and retired, visiting his daughter’s office building in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve where he…

Read More

REVIEW: فروشنده [Forushande] [The Salesman] [2016]

“For once it looks like we’re in luck” There’s this notion that tragedy won’t happen to us. It’s for people who don’t live their lives correctly—some karmic retribution paying for mistakes made along the way. We like to believe we’re different whether such a belief is deserved or not. So when something does occur, only a seething anger results. Anger at your hard work to stay moral and good proving to be for naught; anger about thoughts of revenge seeming impossible considering acting upon them would simply lower you onto…

Read More

REVIEW: Passengers [2016]

“Excellent choice” **Spoilers included** You’re traveling on a spaceship towards a distant planet in hopes of restarting your life anew with endless possibilities. The journey takes 120 years, your body in stasis to arrive the same age that you left. Let’s say something happens around the thirty year mark to cause an unknown malfunction that inexplicably wakes you with no way of returning to slumber. This massive ship is at your disposal—well, the areas accessible by your wrist bracelet’s discerning permissions and a crowbar—but there’s no one with which to…

Read More