In other words, the guy is definitely not the lovey-dovey type. But that unblinking, cold-blooded aesthetic is largely what makes Amour, which opens Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, so remarkable. In its depiction of an elderly Parisian couple coming to terms with illness and looming death, the film is almost brutal in its […]
Phil Bacharach
Posted inArts & Culture
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
That’s what makes The Perks of Being a Wallflower so impressive. New to Blu-ray and DVD, it understands the excess of feeling that characterizes being a teenager, and it doesn’t prettify or minimize the trials faced by the shy and socially awkward kid sitting alone in the school cafeteria. Written and directed by Stephen Chbosky, […]
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A ‘transformational’ gift
“This is the single biggest day, I think, in the memorial’s history,” said local attorney Mike Turpen, co-chair of the memorial’s 9:03 Fund, a campaign to raise $15 million for the museum. That amount includes $10 million for an endowment and $5 million for museum enhancements. The Insasmuch grant, announced at a news conference today, […]
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Searching for Sugar Man
Take, for example, Searching for Sugar Man. Currently up for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award and new to DVD, the doc introduces us to the saga of the one-named Rodriguez, a criminally unknown singer-songwriter from the early 1970s whose career sank into obscurity in his native United States, but whose influence proved monumental in, […]
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Zero Dark Thirty
Some, including Republican Sen. John McCain, accuse director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, who last collaborated on The Hurt Locker, of falsely suggesting that intel gleaned through torture is what led the CIA to bin Laden. The controversy is at a fever pitch. Is ZDT a nearly journalistic work? Is it morally repugnant propaganda? […]
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Looper
In Looper, writer/director Rian Johnson crams in so many, it initially looks as if this sci-fi actioner might collapse under the weight of them all. Dystopian society, time travel, telekinesis, gangland killings — there are a lot of ground rules to keep track of here, much of them conveyed through the wobbly device of a […]
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Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
You might not know it, but chances are Diana Vreeland has a great deal to do with what you think when it comes to fashion, style and design. As fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar and, later, editor of Vogue, she injected post- World War II America with an almost revolutionary sense of, as she put […]
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Cinematic ‘Kingdom’
PHIL BACHARACH’S PICKS 1. Moonrise Kingdom — Director Wes Anderson was born to make this film, a work that beautifully captures the world of adolescent obsession. From its exuberant sense of nostalgia to its Kodachrome visual look, this tale of prepubescent love circa 1965 feels mythical and timeless. 2. Silver Linings Playbook — Bipolar depression, obsessive-compulsive […]
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This Is 40
Opening Friday, This Is 40 tickles the travails of being rich, white and smug. Maybe a grown-up comedy isn’t in the cards for Apatow, whose best works (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) celebrate arrested adolescence. His latest is a generally messy affair: often uproariously funny, but uneven, overlong, largely improvisational, packed with F-bombs and hobbled […]
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Hitchcock
Hitchcock, which opens Friday, isn’t a bad movie; it’s just a baffling one. Purportedly about the making of 1960’s Psycho, it winds up a hodgepodge of old-fashioned biopic, bogus psychological thriller and simplistic domestic melodrama. The film, however, is hardly the work of incompetents. Director Sacha Gervasi has an absorbing rockumentary (Anvil: The Story of […]