Film

	The Lorax: Seuss, Speech, Marketing, and Orange as the New Green By Frederik Sisa @ 3:00 PM March 16, 2012 Found in: Film The Lorax is not a great film, nor is it the best adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s book that one might envision. It is, however, as gently entertaining as it is unapologetic in its stance; a colourful, silly, melancholy, hopeful, stinging and, ultimately, accessible film.read
	W.E. Won’t Rock You By Frederik Sisa @ 4:00 PM January 23, 2012 Found in: Film It’s not a good sign when you suspect filmmakers are lying to you. W.E.’s credits list Abbie Cornish in the role of a maritally distraught New Yorker obsessed with the scandalous love affair between the Once and Never More King of England, Edward VIII, and American Wallis Simpson. But throughout the film I wondered what Charlize Theron was doing slumming around in the glassy lead role when surely there was a better film elsewhere for her to inhabit.read
	You Should Go See ‘Hugo’ By Frederik Sisa @ 4:00 PM December 16, 2011 Found in: Film The big picture of it all is that Hugo is, in detail and scope, a beautiful piece of filmmaking that illustrates in craft what it can only hint at through dialogue. Scorsese delivers so many details to please the cinephile – from a small but benevolent role for the ever-charismatic Christopher Lee, to a humane and top-form performance from Ben Kingsley that reminds us why he’s such a pleasure to watch, to period costumes and locations that dare the audience to resist the urge to crawl into the picture frame – that the film itself becomes testament to why we love letting the movies, and rhetoric about the movies, carry us away.read
	The Muppets: A Fresh Serving of Muppetational Spectacle By Frederik Sisa @ 10:00 AM December 05, 2011 Found in: Film Just as hate might find the source of its progression in fear, despair might find its roots in nostalgia. No wonder, then, that Hollywood finds such a powerful figure in the aging star wilting without the sunlight of celebrity. read
	Cowboys & Aliens: The Year's Most Underrated Blockbuster? By Frederik Sisa @ 1:00 PM August 26, 2011 Found in: Film As tempting as it is to label Cowboys & Aliens a genre mashup, that path leads to confusion – which goes some ways to explaining the mixed reviews and box office performance. Viewed as a seemingly irresolvable chimera, reactions to the film are akin to the befuddlement that the Saturday Night Live’s “It’s Pat!” sketches exploited for laughs, only with less amusement and interpretive acuity. For reference, consider Firefly, a bona fide mashup of two genres that the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tim Goodman, in his review of the cult TV series, described as “alarmingly opposite.” Here we were presented with an aesthetic that jammed together Western and sci-fi tropes, leading to scenes that played out as Westerns with ray-guns and hovering vehicles. Whedon’s blending of visual vocabularies from two strongly defined genres yielded results akin to the Spanglish that comes from the meld of Spanish and English. It worked, albeit very creakily, but the show’s appeal ultimately emerged from the strong storytelling and compelling character archetypes drawn from Western rather than Science Fiction sensibilities. read
	Harry Potter and the Triumphant Finale By Frederik Sisa @ 1:00 PM July 22, 2011 Found in: Film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – While the press salivates about the box office achievement of the last film in the Harry Potter series, it’s worth noting that, financial success aside, it also represents a victory for cinematic storytelling.read
	On Stranger Tides: Watered-Down Rum but Rum Nonetheless By Frederik Sisa @ 11:00 AM May 27, 2011 Found in: Film The Hollywood blockbuster has always been vulnerable to film’s version of shock-and-awe: Too much is never enough. After their previous entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the entertaining but ultimately exhausting and overstuffed At World’s End, screenwriters Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot (and other filmmakers) take mercy on our senses and return to the focused storytelling of the film that started it all, The Curse of Black Pearl.read
	Not Your Ordinary Music Fest: ‘This Is Drop Dead’ By Frederik Sisa @ 12:00 PM May 13, 2011 Found in: Film For nine years, New York and other cities around the world have played host to a scrappy DIY bacchanalia dedicated to drinking up, as the official website puts it, “Art in every aspect of Life.” Still young and independent enough to be considered underground, unlike other DIY-fests that have since sold out, the Drop Dead Festival (DDF) has become an international showcase of iconoclastic musicians and artists from a scene that might loosely fit under the umbrella of goth/death rock/punk if its members didn’t often achieve a more singular, category-defying individuality. read
	‘True Grit’: Some Cattle, Mostly Hat By Frederik Sisa @ 12:00 PM January 28, 2011 Found in: Film The Western today, like a lone tumbleweed, has the tendency of blowing into the movie-going public’s awareness, provoking a few comments for the sheer novelty of it, then blowing right on out in a return to the fringes of unfashionable genre movies. read
	Black Swan: Into the Art of Darkness By Frederik Sisa @ 1:00 PM January 21, 2011 Found in: Film Aranofsky’s work, whose manipulations effortlessly and elegantly blur the line between reality and disturbed psyche to create escalating suspense and fascination, again proves him to be the singular kind of director whose vision is capable of overcoming skepticism over the film’s subject matter.read