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The Ides of March (2011) -vs- Primary Colors (1998)

October 11, 2011 Bryce Zabel 3

The list of more-than-decent films about political campaigns is a short one. Nobody will ever forget Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson in The Best Man or even The Candidate with the Kennedy-esque Robert Redford. During the Years of Lewinsky, Primary Colors took us into the thinly-disguised 1992 Clinton campaign. Now we have The Ides of March, proudly wearing its cynicism on its sleeve at a time when Obama gets pilloried for being practical. In the most recent films, the candidates have that certain problem we mentioned earlier. (Redford is famously remembered in The Candidate as muttering, after winning, “What do we do now?”, but there’s also a quick moment of a campaign worker leaving his room in the morning earlier in the film.)
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And the Smacky Goes To…

March 6, 2010 Bryce Zabel 0

This year’s poll of the Oscar favorites attracted hundreds of our most intelligent readers (see how much we’re willing to pander to those activists?) and they have spoken. We asked them not to vote for the film they think will win but for the film they think should win. They’ve given us a statistical tie between…
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Boldly Not Going There

February 2, 2010 Beau DeMayo 6

Yes, I'm still smarting over the Academy stiffing "The Dark Knight" last year — a film that will stand the test of time and be remembered as the game-changer that it was. Other nominees from […]

Ten Years of Super Moments

January 7, 2010 Beau DeMayo 3

There’s a theory that a movie, in order to succeed, only needs a handful of scenes or moments that really, really work. In other words, the macro is made from the micro. With the decade wrapped and a new one underway, I succumb to list-itis, and offer up ten major moments in films from the last ten years.
These are moments in film that just blew me away, that left me out of my body, totally immersed in the film’s emotion. This happens so little in film for me, that when it actually occurs, I’m left speechless (which is why, I guess, I’m compelled to write about them).
These are the moments I leave the theater thinking about, against which I compare my own life’s events. These moments in time are what movies are all about, and #10 on the list comes from one of my favorite films, “Superman Returns.”
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