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Posts Tagged With ‘ anthony mackie ’

 

The Algiers Lives On

August 6th, 2017

I’m a father to a ten-year-old boy. Part of my job is to teach him to be a decent human being, to be kind to others, help whenever possible, and try to make things suck just a little bit less. I’m also white. My wife is white, so that makes our kid white. That whiteness gives us advantages, ones that we often take for granted but are nevertheless enormous. Here’s an example. Last weekend, my wife got busted for speeding. Was she really speeding, or was she targeted due to her race or gender? Oh, I guarantee she was legitimately speeding. She told me later that the entire interaction... Read More

It Always Ends In A Fight

May 8th, 2016

With a few exceptions, nobody sets out to make a bad movie. Whether the filmmakers are confident or delusional, they start out with good intentions. But here’s where it gets tricky. In order to make a good movie, you need a compelling story, interesting characters, and a way to bring the two together organically. Sounds easy, right? It gets even harder when we move into the world of blockbuster filmmaking. You have to factor in massive budgets, the desire of nervous executives stifling risk in order to maximize profits, and inexperienced directors getting swallowed up by their project.*... Read More

More Shooting, Please

February 28th, 2016

Heat changed a lot of things. Released in 1995, it was a sprawling crime saga pitting obsessive cop Al Pacino against clever thief Robert De Niro. Watching it, you’ll have a lot to enjoy. A ridiculously talented cast. Highly precise action scenes. Existential musings found within a labyrinthine plot. It’s probably the best thing writer/director Michael Mann has ever done. In its DNA, you can see strands of Reservoir Dogs, The Getaway, and Charley Varrick, to name a few. But Heat is the platonic ideal of what the modern heist film should be. We see echoes of it in films like Sicario and... Read More

Season’s Tweakings

November 22nd, 2015

When it comes to performers, we’re ridiculously inconsistent. We discover an actor we like, and we want them to deliver more of what attracted us in the first place. Then we either throw a fit if they take a chance on something new, or bitterly complain when they do “more of the same.” One example is poor Meg Ryan. Long known as a darling of fluffy rom-coms, she understandably grew tired of briefly being America’s sweetheart. As a result, she tried to stretch her range. She played a crumbling alcoholic in When A Man Loves A Woman, and a doomed Army helicopter pilot in Courage... Read More