Review: Black Swan
The countless men who feel that being dragged to a ballet with their female companions is boring are in for a rude awakening when they see Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, an aggressively paced, twisted film that leaves your head spinning faster than a well-executed pirouette.
In the film, Natalie Portman plays Nina, a young and delicate ballerina tapped to dance the dual leads in Swan Lake. She has the innocence to play the White Swan but is encouraged to explore her dark side by her demanding director (Vincent Cassel). With an overzealous stage parent of a mother (Barbara Hershey) and a pretty and talented newcomer challenging her for the role (Mila Kunis), doing so is hardly difficult for Nina, who it is established early is far from mentally stable to begin with. As the ballet’s opening approaches, though, Nina’s mind is overtaken by the darkness and, like the character she represents, she is overtaken by the Black Swan. Continue Reading >>
Review: The Green Hornet
In the action comedy The Green Hornet, Seth Rogen takes the word “antihero” to a new level; in fact, his character is so far from heroic that he relies on his mechanic sidekick to trick out his car and do the majority of the fighting.
Rogen is Britt Reid, a playboy newspaper heir who is more comfortable as a subject of gossip articles than the editor of news columns. But when his father dies and his mourning finds him hanging out in bad parts of the city, Reid rises from the depth of disinterest to try to infiltrate and eliminate the city’s crime syndicate. He teams with his father’s mechanic Kato (John Chou), a karate and weapons expert, to back him up. Continue Reading >>
Review: The Decemberists – The King is Dead
In reviewing The Decemberists’ newest album, The King is Dead, it seems a popular path among critics to come out as a hater of the band’s epic 2009 rock opera, The Hazards of Love. Some have even gone as far as to see the simplicity of King – with its lack of an overarching theme and comparatively understated, American roots and bluegrass styling – as an apology for the bombast of Hazards. Continue Reading >>
Review: True Grit
I can’t put my finger on what exactly drew me to True Grit. I have not seen the original, revered film by the same name and starring my late grandfather’s favorite actor, I don’t hold a candle for the Coen brother’s films other than Fargo and The Hudsucker Proxy, and I’m not particularly fond of westerns. Nevertheless, I felt a great urgency to see this movie, and my instincts proved me right. Continue Reading >>
Let’s Try This Again…Again
The apologetic, early-year post about lack of updates and resolve to course correct is a tired trope in the blog sphere these days, but here I am writing one. Over the past several months, I’ve seen movies and come home afraid to write about them. The empty screen was a scary thing; a bottomless chasm that I felt I needed to fill with as many words as possible. I instead posted shorter, 140-character reviews to my Twitter and Facebook pages. Surely, somewhere between six-paragraph screeds and tightly-packaged tweets, there lies a middle ground.
So, we’re going to try something new here: get back to updating with some level of frequency, but relish in brevity. You’ll get thoughtful reviews of the pop culture that I consume (not always guaranteed to be new releases; it’s too expensive to go to the multiplex anymore), just shorter. I’ll also be trying to expand the variety of my posts as I keep up with some of my New Year’s goals: to take a photo per week and read a book per month. Hopefully, that will keep me active enough to post.
