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Posts Tagged With ‘ linda cardellini ’

 

Touchable

May 17th, 2020

  Sometimes the meaning of a life is revealed at the end of it. We’ve seen that in film for decades, and perhaps the best example of this is Citizen Kane.* After a meteoric rise and a life spent in journalism and the halls of power, Charles Foster Kane is moments away from death. He whispers, “Rosebud,” and as the film commences, we learn that all the power and prestige in the world is meaningless without love. A real life tends to be messier. Sometimes that’s problematic, and reality is jettisoned in favor of a narrative. The end result might look a bit like Braveheart, a cracking... Read More

Driving Mr. Shirley

December 2nd, 2018

I’ve mentioned to you guys before that my wife is not the world’s biggest fan of going to the movies. As a semi-professional introvert, the notion of being crammed into a theater with loud talkers, loud eaters, and dipsticks checking their smartphones every three minutes does not appeal to her. Weird, huh? Along with all of that, she feels a high degree of scorn toward a certain type of film — dramas that are “Inspired By A True Story.” When she sees that phrase in a trailer, she just can’t help herself and she’ll snort disdainfully. Why that particular phrase? It implies that the... Read More

The Most Terrible Poverty is Loneliness – Local Movie Reviewer Takes on A Simple Favor

September 23rd, 2018

What’s the point of consistently stepping outside our comfort zones? It’s healthy to stretch yourself. Most of us have been encouraged/yelled at by our parents to try new experiences, eat new delicacies, go to new places. By doing that, we get smarter, more empathetic, more sophisticated. When filmmakers stretch themselves? That’s the good stuff. That’s when you have the chance to see something unique. Take Adam McKay for example. As a close friend of Will Ferrell’s, his directorial career began with films like Anchorman and Step Brothers, comedies that walked a fine line between surrealism... Read More

Big Macs Are For Closers

January 29th, 2017

Not long ago, I read the incredible book “Strangers in their Own Land,” by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. She visited Louisiana and interviewed scads of people to ask them about their voting habits. Specifically, she wanted to find out why these decent and smart people continually voted against their own interests. If you lived in a place like Louisiana, with gorgeous wetlands and lakes you could fish in and enjoy, why would you vote for people that would lift environmental regulations and pollute them at will? For many of them, they viewed it as a binary choice. You could... Read More