What is unexpected, however, is that this mash note comes in a rare outing for him: a family-friendly film based on a popular children’s book. Set in 1930s Paris, “Hugo” concerns Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield, “The Wolfman”), a young boy who keeps the clocks running in a sprawling train station. Orphaned and on his own, […]
Martin Scorsese
Posted inArts & Culture
Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff
Pretty good for a man who considered his job to be “nonsense,” in an industry he found “full of hypocrisy and hyperbole.” Bookended by footage of the man receiving his honorary Academy Award — the first cinematographer to do so — in 2001, “Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff” celebrates his lengthy and […]
Posted inMusic
Celtic pride
When director Martin Scorsese looked for the perfect song to blast over the beginning of the Boston-set “The Departed,” he found it in Massachusetts-based Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up to Boston.” The group found that out the same time moviegoers did. “They never told us how they were going to use the song. We were […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
Martial-arts film fans know the answer: He’s a fictional folk hero played by Bruce Lee in 1972’s “Fist of Fury,” then Jet Li in 1994’s “Fist of Legend,” and now Donnie Yen in this, although the movies have no real relationship to one another — well, other than being cool, of course. If anything, “Legend […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kill the Irishman
It’s hardly the only instance of a mob film you’ll be reminded of while watching writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh’s biopic of Irish gangster Danny Greene, but at least the filmmaker cribs from the best and makes them work for his own. If the phrase “luck of the Irish” didn’t already exist, it would have to be […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Worst. Prom. Ever.
And whereas Disney’s version is free of sex, drugs and bad language, and thus geared toward people too young to go to actual prom, MTV’s revels in the raunch on a PG-13 level, thus geared toward people of the perfect prom age, but hopefully still too young to be doing any of the other things, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mesrine: Killer Instinct
But in the films he makes back home in his native France, he can be such a bad-ass, perhaps never more so than in the title role of “Mesrine: Killer Instinct,” the first in a pair of biopics on French gangster Jacques Mesrine, who died in 1979. (The sequel, “Mesrine: Public Enemy #1,” follows in […]