Movie Review: Crazy Heart

2009. Starring Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Directed by Scott Cooper. I’ve probably watched a total of 15 minutes of American Idol over the years, usually early in the season when they focus on those who perform, well, less Idol-like. Those not-ready-for-prime-time singers get a inordinate amount of airtime — enough so the audience can relish the dream-crushing coups de grace from the show’s judges. Whether the early cuts take their discouragement in tears or by rejecting the judgment they lusted for minutes earlier, they have to accept that they have failed. Their belief in themselves has betrayed them. I’m …

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Movie Review: Make Way For Tomorrow

1937. Starring Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi. Directed by Leo McCarey. Leo McCarey’s Make Way For Tomorrow is known by more than one critic as “the saddest movie ever made.” I think that claim could be challenged if you consider sadness to be tragic, cruel and the result of the too-often human disregard for humanity. In that case, you’ve got Schindler’s List, The Killing Fields and Fires on the Plain to compete with. No, the kind of sadness that permeates Make Way For Tomorrow is a sentimental weariness concerning the passing of time and the changing role of parents as …

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Movie Review: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

2002. Directed by Chan-wook Park. Starring Kang-ho Song. American movie portrayals of “vengeance” are crowd-pleasers. Mel Gibson has practically adopted the motivation as a screen persona. Vengeance as a plot device kept Charles Bronson employed for many uninspired years. Picture Harrison Ford in almost any movie in the past decade-and-a-half and he’s probably yelling, “Give me back my daughter!” or “I want to know what happened to my wife!” while the veins in his neck threaten to secede. The Korean director, Chan-wook Park, has explored vengeance in a trio of movies — Oldboy, Lady Vengeance and, in the first of …

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Movie Review: Anvil! The Story of Anvil

You learn something every day. One day, you know nothing about a Canadian heavy metal band named Anvil, and suddenly you learn that they’ve recorded twelve albums (and are working on numbers 13 and 14) and were considered to be a contemporary of metal legends like Metallica, Anthrax and Motorhead. You might not have known that Slash of Guns ‘n’ Roses was a teenage fan and that, once in their youth, they met with head-banging reverence by festival crowds. And, surprisingly, you learn that a documentary about a past-their-prime Canadian heavy metal hair band on a long, long losing streak …

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Movie Review: The Cove

2009. Directed by Louis Psihoyos. I put off watching The Cove because I knew what I was going to see. Sometimes you need movies to escape the depressing aspects of life, rather than focus on them. But witnessing what happens in this brave documentary is important. The debut of this film was the first I’d heard about the dolphin capture and slaughter in a hidden cove near Taiji, along the coast of Japan. From September to March of every year, dolphins are detoured from their migratory route, chased by boats with men aboard banging on pipes, and herded into shallow …

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Movie Review: Up In The Air

2009. Starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick. Directed by Jason Reitman. The irony is thick in Up In The Air. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a happy air warrior who specializes in firing employees for timid employers all over the country. He is summoned back to HQ for a change in direction — a young colleague (Anna Kendrick) has devised a means of firing people through videoconferencing, effectively terminating Bingham from the profession he has perfected. Bingham sees the benefit of a face-to-face dismissal for every kind of unwanted employee, a way to soften the blow and minimize the …

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Movie Review: Tyson

2008. Directed by James Toback. Mike Tyson’s face is the most convincing proof that he was a boxer. He was shorter than nearly all his opponents. His peculiarly high voice, filtered through an odd lisp that you’d be surprised to hear uncorrected in an adult, made him an easy impersonation, easy to ridicule. His chaotic and scandalous personal life cost him years of freedom, the loss of his fortune, and much of the respect he’d gained in the ring. But I remember his fights. I remember thinking that there was no one more terrifying than Tyson in the ring, fixed …

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Country Music Reclamation Project: When the Roses Bloom Again

Seeing old photographs at a garage sale or in an antique store bothers me. Once separated from an ancestor, those photos become untraceable. The faces lose their names, and that person, so real and human during their short toil on earth, becomes a ghost. My ancestors have been diligent at saving and identifying photographs. Among them are a handful of tintypes, a means of photography in the late 1800s created through an emulsion made on a piece of metal. Several of the ones I’ve got are identified, but one has always puzzled me — a tintype of two Civil War …

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Movie Review: Seven Men From Now

1956. Starring Randolph Scott and Lee Marvin. Directed by Budd Boetticher. A reference somewhere to Budd Boetticher as a “cult director” was enough to get me to see one of his late 1950s westerns, so I thought I’d watch the first, Seven Men From Now, and build up to the better-known and much-respected The Tall T. I love westerns but have had my fill of the conventional ones, and it’s not often that someone tinkers with the old formula enough — with a great story and performance like Unforgiven, or the ensemble masterpiece that is Deadwood — to make an …

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Movie Review: Homicide

1991.  Starring Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy. Written and Directed by David Mamet. I may have forgotten when I put Homicide on my Netflix list that it was written and directed by David Mamet. I knew that it was a new release from The Criterion Collection, and there are few films among them not worth watching. And I knew it starred Joe Mantegna, who also starred in House of Games, a particular favorite of mine, also released by Criterion. But I should have realized that Homicide, like House of Games, was written and directed by Mamet, and it always …

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