TIFF20 REVIEW: Concrete Cowboy [2020]

The past is not the present. There’s a pretty timely notion hiding in the background of director Ricky Staub and co-writer Dan Walser‘s Concrete Cowboy. Republicans love to spin a reductive talking point out of the “defund the police” initiative, but that plea isn’t actually demanding we dissolve law enforcement. It merely seeks to divert their excess of funds in order to assist them since they’re the first to admit they’re treading water in the deep end without a means to exit. Every time the government slashes a social program’s…

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REVIEW: Paterson [2016]

“Without love, what reason is there for anything?” Doctor William Carlos Williams includes a line inside his epic poem “Paterson” that states: “no ideas but in things.” When writer/director Jim Jarmusch was asked what this meant, he replied: “that you start with the things around you and the details of daily life and you find beauty and resonance in them—poetry grows out of that.” By those terms poetry is forever all around us in the tiny details of life that too many let pass them by without a second thought.…

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REVIEW: Keanu [2016]

“It’s like smoking crack with God” After the massive success of former “MADtv” comics Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key’s eponymous sketch comedy show “Key & Peele” it was only a matter of time before the duo would grace the silver screen together. It’s actually surprising that it’s taken this long (the Comedy Central property went for five seasons before being put on indefinite hold by the creators) considering Key is everywhere you look these days on TV and film. Peele is the one you don’t notice very much (and only…

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Wiig, Gyllenhaal, and Monster Love at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival

Friends and family think me crazy for driving up the QEW so I can sit in darkened theaters for around thirty of a total eighty-hours in Toronto, but I wouldn’t spend my early September days any other way. This is what the Toronto International Film Festival does—it makes you look sanity in the face, say no thanks, and go the exact opposite way towards a world-renowned cinematic spectacle those same people are jealous about once I tell them I saw Kristen Wiig tell a joke. It was a funny one too…

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TIFF14 REVIEW: The Cobbler [2015]

“I’m not gonna eat you!” Adults need fairy tales too and Thomas McCarthy—with cowriter Paul Sado—deliver one in The Cobbler. They don’t try to pretend it’s something more either as its opening prologue can attest thanks to older tradesmen on the Lower East Side speaking Yiddish around a table to think up a way to defeat the evil landlord raising their rent to drive them away. Cut to the local shoe man deemed their savior stitching up a pair of loafers with son in tow and we learn his machine…

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