Review: Thor: The Dark World

Anne Marie here with a look at Marvel's latest blockbuster.

And so the Great Marvel Experiment continues with the studio's latest film, Thor: The Dark World. Marvel can be credited with doing something virtually unprecedented in Hollywood: creating an extended cinematic universe with many different intersecting films, characters, and plotlines. Unlike a universe built by sequels and trilogies (like Star Wars) or subtle Easter eggs (like Quentin Tarantino's films), the universe created by Marvel built on a decade-long-ish Three Phase plan. The Avengers ended Phase One rather spectacularly.

Phase Two got off to a rocky-if-enjoyable start with Iron Man 3. However, as a Marvel character licensed to a different studio once said, "With great power comes great responsibility." Marvel doesn't get a free pass to make an inferior movie just because they're breaking new ground. Unfortunately, Thor: The Dark World, the second installment in Phase Two, might be just that inferior movie. [more...]

Click to read more ...

Review: Dallas Buyer's Club

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

"Silence = Death" was a particularly genius political slogan for AIDS activists in the 1980s. Potently succinct, righteously angry, and, best of all, both literally and spiritually true.  The conversations it prompted about systemic gay oppression, political complacency, the importance of frank sexual discussion, and gay liberation -- particularly in regards to the fight against HIV and AIDS --  surely saved countless lives. But isn't it a curious thing that HIV/AIDS in the arts and entertainments still remains so tied to gay-only narratives of roughly a ten year window from the early 80s through the early 90s? Time to tell new stories from fresh perspectives? Enter DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, one of the first AIDS dramas (that I can recall at least) that is not about the gay community. 

Matthew McConaughey stars as Ron Woodroff, a hard-living homophobe electrician. When we first meet him he's having a drug-fueled three way with two women behind the scenes at the rodeo. While we're watching him getting it on, he's watching a man getting gored at the rodeo. This opening sequence arguably shoves the entirely less useful 'Sex = Death' argument in your face, but the film quickly finds its footing as an involving drama about a man who doesn't know what's knocked him out and also is too damn stubborn to stay down. 

Click to read more ...

Our Coven: Anjelica Huston IS The Grand High Witch

I was all about to complete "Our Coven" -- our series of holiday witch posts -- in the traditional way when I realized that this requested review of The Witches that I'd written years ago had been lost from the internet! So we must repost with a couple minor updates. I hope you'll enjoy this look back at a key film from 1990.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Celebrate with The Witches 

Click to read more ...

Review: Blue is the Warmest Color

Adele (Adele Exarchopolous) is voracious. We first note this when she’s devouring a huge plate of spaghetti at her family’s table. She practically hoovers it down, tomato sauce staining her mouth, before going back for seconds. She reads and writes the same way, albeit offscreen, devouring 600 page novels and writing intimate diaries. But what we see is her various oral fixations and one doesn’t eat literature. If she’s not shoving cigarettes in her mouth, it’s food (and, later, body parts). In one endearing moment she shoves a chocolate bar in her wet face during a crying jag getting a huge laugh from moviegoers who've also eaten their feelings.

Adele will eat anything but seafood. That would be a sly tongue-in-(uhhhh)cheek joke if the new lesbian drama BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR didn’t make a point of it in two separate scenes. Instead this provocative film -- already famous round the globe for its explicit sex and post-Cannes disputes between its actresses and director – risks camp by playing it straight. It shamelessly equates oysters to ladyparts and in one scene that is either comical, ridiculous, perverse or all three, Adele’s older girlfriend Emma (Léa Seydoux) teaches her how to eat them… in front of the parents!

Guess what? She likes it.

Click to read more ...

"Gravity" and The Limits of A Perfect 10

a version of this review originally appeared in my column at Towleroad.

There's a brief scene in Nicole Holofcener's engaging indie hit ENOUGH SAID that repeats enough times that it could be the chorus if the movie were a song. A massage therapist (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) arrives at the home of a fit male client who lives on the top floor of his building. Every time she arrives he pops out with a killer smile looking down to greet her. He never thinks to help her as she arduously lugs her massage table up the entire steep flight of stairs.  

Excuse the stretch but this is sometimes how it feels to write about movies. Especially the ones that are true lookers that you're still just not that into.

By any definition GRAVITY is the movie of the moment and by some measures it will come to be regarded as The Movie of the Year...

Click to read more ...