To help you improve your movie life, I’ve developed a handy-dandy guide to indie film, as follows, so incredibly handy and dandy that you will not only gain a comprehensive expertise, you will be able to create your own independent film immediately upon finishing reading this article. Let’s start, shall we?
Talking Movies
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Talking Movies: Rounding the bases abroad
As summer dawns, American sports fans begin to drift into a sort of happy languor as they pursue the time-honored rituals of the national pastime. Between the point at which Cubs fans recognize that their team’s hopes are exclusively mathematical and the hoopla of the mid-July all-star break, early season excitement flattens into the more […]
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Talking Movies: The horror, the horror!
Upstream Color, the eagerly awaited second film by indie director Shane Carruth, is extremely difficult to describe. It’s partially a mind-blowing sci-fi film along the lines of his first movie, Primer, which won the 2004 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. It’s also kind of a romance. But if I were forced to label it, I’d […]
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Talking Movies: Origin story
Two major movie releases are happening this late spring: The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann) on May 10 and Man of Steel (Zack Snyder) on June 14. Man of Steel is about a guy who gets transplanted from a strange alien world called Krypton to the wholesome, unassuming Midwest. The Great Gatsby is about a guy […]
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Talking Movies: Pablo Larrain’s No
During the run-up to the Iraq war, there was a popular bumper sticker which satirized the idea of Iraqi elections. It showed an imaginary Iraqi ballot with two voting options. Option one said “I vote for Saddam Hussein;” option two said “Please arrest me and torture my family.”
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Talking Movies: The perfect game
As spring turns the grass green, my fancy lightly turns to thoughts of baseball. The fancies of movie producers must also turn in that direction, because 42, the new biopic about Jackie Robinson, is just opening.
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Talking Movies: Oppression’s Cold Embrace
Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may not envision their award quite this way, the “Best Foreign Language Film” Oscar seems really to recognize the best film of the year made anywhere on Earth except those English-speaking countries, which for the Golden Boy, really means any place not Hollywood. Math king and possible robot, Nate Silver did not even bother to predict a winner in this category for 2013, largely because he had no data—other film organizations in the United States do not give an award for best foreign film.
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Talking Movies: Taking on another dimension
I recently sat down with glasses atop my glasses to watch Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Previews of money-grubbing re-releases zoomed out at me: Titanic 3D, Star Wars 3D, Halloween 3D, Lion King 3D, Raiders of the Lost…
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Talking Movies: Rust & Bone
The spirit of our age walks on prosthetic limbs. Of course, humanity has always been fascinated by amputees. But whereas prosthetics were once a sign of creepiness, from Captain Ahab to Captain Hook, now they’re attached to sympathetic heroes. Think of Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic “Blade Runner,” sadly on trial for murdering his model-girlfriend; or […]
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Moon Zero Three premiers Thursday 2/28 at PATV
Tonight marks the release of the first installment of long-awaited, locally produced sci-fi epic Moon Zero Three. (Starring former Hawkeye basketball star Acie Earl!) Check out the trailer and head over to PATV (206 Lafayette) for the 7 p.m. screening.
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Talking Movies: Pitching Woo
Maybe your Valentine’s Day attempts to court that hottie with a pulse weren’t such a success. So what? Hop back on that horse. The horse of studious preparation, that is. If I’ve learned anything from movies it’s that everybody wants the same brand of magical happily-ever-after love: domestic, heterosexual, monogamous, procreating, eternal love. Yes, everybody … even you!
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Talking Movies: Lincoln before Spielberg
I’ll be surprised if Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln doesn’t take a handful of the 12 Academy Awards for which it’s nominated. The greatest movie about our 16th president, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), lost its sole Academy Award nomination, Best Original Screenplay, to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. More proof of an unjust universe. Not […]
