The Movie:

Approaching writing about a movie like We Need to Talk About Kevin is not nearly as difficult to broach as watching it, but like the film itself once the initial hurdles of apprehension are cleared, the rest of the discussion is one of passion and enthusiasm and flows easily. As it turns out, regardless of the material the film's merits go beyond any preconceived notions of what the source material might have in mind.

Based on Lionel Shriver's novel, the story was adapted into a screenplay by Rory Kinnear and Lynne Ramsay, (Ratcatcher) the latter of whom directed the film. Tilda Swinton (Burn After Reading) plays Eva, an accomplished travel writer and author who meets Franklin (John C. Reilly, Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

"I'm up here trying to be a good lead singer of a band and a good dad at the same time," says Jim Lindberg, of the venerable punk band Pennywise, "and you worry that you're doing a bad job at both." This is the conundrum faced by all of the tattooed, pierced, hard-rocking family men at the center of The Other F-Word, an entertaining and thoughtful documentary from filmmaker Andrea Blaugrund. She looks at a handful of musicians--including Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ron Reyes from Black Flag, Lars Frederiksen from Rancid, Art Alexakis from Everclear, and Mark Hoppus from Blink-182--who are attempting to intermingle two seemingly incongruent ethos: punk rock and responsible fatherhood.

The film is steeped in history; Blaugrund gives us a keen understanding of what was happening in music (and in American youth culture) when punk hit, what it was about, and ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Growing up is a weird thing. Some of us fight it, wanting to hold onto our youth for as long as we can, refusing to change with age and constantly struggling against the system, others embrace it and once they're out of college are content to put on a suit and tie and work for a faceless corporation. Anyone who grew up with any connection to punk rock probably falls into the earlier category, but as Andrea Blaugrund Nevins' documentary The Other F Word explains, even punks will change - particularly once kids are involved. The documentary, which focuses pretty much entirely on the west coast scene by covering bands from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, gives us a quick rundown of how rough and tumble the punk scene was in the eighties by showcasing violence at Black Flag shows and using a few news clippings to show how scared the establishment was of these ...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival

Two terrific actresses made their feature film debuts in Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. One of them was Kate Winslet, and well, you know what happened to her. The other was Melanie Lynskey, who went on to a decidedly lower-profile career than her co-star's; rather than sinking on the Titanic and winning Oscars, Lynskey has become one of the most valuable utility players in film (and television), giving brief but memorable jolts to pictures like Shattered Glass...Read the entire review

Eva (Tilda Swinton) is a woman who has learned to walk between the raindrops. She keeps her head down; she ignores the people who stare or point. Something terrible happened in her recent past, something involving her son Kevin (Ezra Miller), and she feels responsible. She's trying like hell to get on with her life, but that's clearly not going to happen; she's too haunted, by whispers, memories, ghosts.

Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin tells Eva's story within a fractured narrative that becomes a dreamlike intermingling of her complicated past with her tortured present. It also does so without telling us more than we need to know about either, yet never seeming to withhold information; in spite of our uncertainty (particularly in the opening scenes) abou...Read the entire review

Woodrow (Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are lifelong friends who spend their time in their garages, always tweaking and testing some device designed to explode or destroy. After an average day shooting propane tanks with shotguns, the two head to a local bar, where Woodrow is roped into a cricket eating contest against Milly (Jessie Wiseman), who catches Woodrow's eye immediately. What starts as awkward bar chatter turns into a date, and the date turns into a relationship. Jump forward a few months, and Woodrow's life is beginning to collapse around him, and beneath his mawkish exterior, there's a hatred bubbling up as explosive as one of his inventions.

Bellflower is a poisonous scream of a movie, full of bile and anger and resentment. Glodell, also the film's writer/director, stages the destruction of Woodrow's relationship with Milly (and his growing distance from others around him)...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The images used here are from the standard definition DVD included with the Blu-Ray and not from the Blu-Ray itself.

Woodrow and Aiden grew up together in Wisconsin, obsessing over their Mad Max VHS and dreaming of how they'd survive the apocalypse. When they got older, they moved to California because they thought it would be cool, and since they've been there, they have continued to plan for the forthcoming end of days. They are building a flamethrower and have ideas for a car that shoots fire out of its tailpipes and would signal their supreme power while the rest of us run scared from whatever has rained down on our heads.

Except if ther...Read the entire review

"I'm up here trying to be a good lead singer of a band and a good dad at the same time," says Jim Lindberg, of the venerable punk band Pennywise, "and you worry that you're doing a bad job at both." This is the conundrum faced by all of the tattooed, pierced, hard-rocking family men at the center of The Other F-Word, an entertaining and thoughtful new documentary from filmmaker Andrea Blaugrund. She looks at a handful of musicians--including Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ron Reyes from Black Flag, Lars Frederiksen from Rancid, Art Alexakis from Everclear, and Mark Hoppus from Blink-182--who are attempting to intermingle two seemingly incongruent ethos: punk rock and responsible fatherhood.

The film is steeped in history; Blaugrund gives us a keen understanding o...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The images used here are from the standard definition DVD included with the Blu-Ray and not from the Blu-Ray itself.

What if Santa Claus were real, but instead of being the kindly old gentleman you see on greeting cards, he's really a horned devil who comes and steals naughty children for punishment? This is the Santa that the little boy Pietari (Onni Tomilla) believes in. He's read about the true Kris Kringle in books, and when an American company begins drilling in the mountain near his Finnish home, he's scared of what they'll find. Is that Santa Claus living deep down there in the frozen earth?

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale was a surprise hit last year when it was released to theaters for the ho...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

As our world grows increasingly homogenized, it gets easier and easier to fall into one way of thinking, accepting conventional "wisdom" and media-perpetrated fallacies that increasingly compartmentalize who we are and how we think. Accepted clich s about different types of people range from the seemingly benign--"All environmental protestors are filthy hippies"--to dangerously jingoistic--"Only people with brown skin can be terrorists." In some cases, these clich s cross over into legal definitions. For instance, "A corporation is a human being." Sadly, corporations are better equipped to deal with an Orwellian quagmire posed by such a radical re-defining of terms; for an actual individual person, it might not be so easy.

For instance, what if you...Read the entire review

Woodrow (Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are a pair of lifelong friends who spend their time in their garages, coming up with some new device, mainly those that explode. After a normal day shotgunning propane canisters, the two head to a local bar, where Woodrow is roped into a cricket eating contest against Milly (Jessie Wiseman), a blonde who catches Woodrow's eye immediately. What starts as awkward bar chatter turns into a date, and the date turns into a relationship. Unfortunately, like Woodrow and Aiden's inventions, however, the relationship -- and Woodrow's life -- are about to blow up.

Bellflower is an angry movie. Even the cinematography by Joel Hodge is angry, with its colors cranked up in contrast and frequently blown out. Glodell, also the film's writer/director, is determined to explore the truly dark and disturbing parts of that anger, the parts that, if you were the one f...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff is not a film that is interested in burdening us with a lot of exposition. The title card gives us the time and place: "Oregon, 1845." The opening sequence is free of dialogue and composed almost entirely of long, languid takes--a group of settlers, executing a river crossing. The action is done plainly, without flourish. It is a good ten minutes before we get a good enough look at Michelle Williams, the star of the picture, to recognize her. There are no proper introductions, because we are joining a story in progress.

Slowly, we begin to piece together who is who, and what is happening. The group consists of three couples, one of them with a child (and expecting another), and a guide. His name is Meek (Bruce Greenwood), and he is, by all appearances, not very good at his job. The journey should have taken two weeks. So far, it ha...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The phrase "human interest story" has some negative connotations: it brings to mind soft, banal news at best, gawking exploitation at worst. Make it a human interest story about 9/11, and it would seem you were really asking for trouble. Yet Jim Whitaker's documentary Rebirth, a film made under the auspices of the post-9/11 nonprofit organization Project Rebirth, is just that, and it manages at the same time to be a respectful, compassionate, moving chronicle of the post-devastation lives of five individuals directly affected by the World Trade Center attacks. Instead of bowing to the interests of untroubling accessibility or entertainment value by boiling down and trivializing the sometimes knotty unpleasantness of lives struck by tr...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

You might expect there to be some unavoidable element of agitprop in a documentary on the highly controversial Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a radical organization that garnered much attention and scrutiny in the late 1990s by vandalizing property--lumber mill offices, slaughterhouses, SUV dealerships, etc.--they considered emblematic of environmental irresponsibility. But documentarian Marshall Curry, the director of If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, takes a refreshing, honestly curious approach that transforms what could easily have been a more simplistic film about "perpetrators" and "victims," "hippies" and "pigs," heroes and villains, into something rich, thoughtful, even profound. His investigation of a difficult,...Read the entire review

Evan Glodell's Bellflower begins with one of the oddest Meet-Cutes you've ever seen. Woodrow (Glodell) and his buddy Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are hanging out in a bar when their big promotion of the night is announced: a cricket-eating contest. The prize is nominal, but it's just the kind of thing that sounds like fun when you're half in the bag, and Woodrow likes the looks of Milly (Jessie Wiseman), the first girl to volunteer, so he's in. She destroys him, but they get to talking afterwards; she's got a terrific, wide smile, and an endearing way of calling him "buddy," and she isn't thrown by his response when she asks what he does ("I'm building a flamethrower"). He gets her phone number.

One of the many things that Bellflower gets exactly right is that palpable...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Marc Singer's documentary about homeless people living in the subway tunnels under New York City, Dark Days, was released at the turn of the new century, and to celebrate its decade milestone, Oscilloscope Labs has released a 10th-anniversary edition, marking an upgrade in packaging for a film that has been absent from DVD for some time.

There is no hard sell or high-concept pitch for this one. Singer opens the lid on an entire community living below the streets of the Big Apple. Some of the folks went underground in the 1970s and had yet to move their lives back up top when the film crew went down into the blackness. Living in a state of perpetual night, these tunnel dwellers learn to cope with their surroundings, building homes out of scra...Read the entire review

Who Took the Bomp?: Le Tigre on Tour:
Rock doc shocks Jock. I'm not a disc jockey, but I couldn't resist that line. I will admit to shock, however, since I had no real knowledge of Le Tigre prior to watching this 70-minute movie (just vague awareness of Kathleen Hanna/Bikini Kill/ and the attendant feminist Politics). Knowing nothing about the music or personalities involved in Le Tigre, I came away shocked at how much I now love this band. Among many reasons is the fact that this is a fabulous tour documentary full of wit, style and intelligence - plus it looks and sounds great, from its packaging on. If you're a serious music fan this is pretty much a solid blind buy, must have, or what have you.

Director Kerthy Fix followed the band on its International Farewell Tour in 2004/05, (the band went back into the studio in 2009 as well as doing other interesting work ...) culling awesome onsta...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

One of the first scenes in the concert documentary Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour features band member J.D. Samson in her hotel room in Australia making fun of the description of the group in the program for the festival they are there to play. This makes writing my own explanation about what Le Tigre sounds like a little daunting. But then, I supposed if any of the three-piece rock outfit wants to take the time to crack wise about my prose, I should take it as a compliment.

Le Tigre took life in the late 1990s. It was formed by Kathleen Hanna, best known as the front woman for the influential riot grrl band Bikini Kill, and also by her alter ego Julie Ruin. On the latter album, she moved from the shouty punk aesthetic of her first band ...Read the entire review

OK, this is a new one to me: A Swedish filmmaker brings us the story of Nicaraguan laborers treated unfairly by a major American food company. Yet that's precisely what Bananas!* (2009) delivers: this documentary spills the beans on a lawsuit brought against Dole Food Company and Dow Chemicals two years earlier...and, of course, the legal battle that ensued. At the forefront of Bananas!* is Los Angeles-based personal injury attorney Juan Dominguez, who's representing a dozen Nicaraguan workers diagnosed as "sterile". Their unfortunate medical condition appears to be the direct result of their exposure to DBCP (a pesticide banned by the EPA in 1979), which was still being used by Dole in their local banana plantations.

The plot of Bananas!* thickens, and thickens quickly. F...Read the entire review

THE FILM

Here's a motion picture that completely unravels in its second half, but that initial rush of sinful obsession and frayed communication makes an immense impression. "Monogamy" approaches the delicate subject of fidelity, yet turns a common discussion of intimacy into a bizarre psychological study, losing its grip on potent topics to play with indie film clich s. I walked away from the film disappointed, but there are some powerful ideas and performances buried somewhere in here, underneath the performance art itches.

Mere months away from their wedding date, photographer Theo (Chris Messina) and singer Nat (Rashida Jones) are seemingly happy in their pre-wed bliss, though it's clear their sex life has diminished. To supplement his wedding photography day job, Theo has established "Gumshoot," a small business that finds the artist paid to follow his subjects ar...Read the entire review