 The Smackdown Goofy. Human. Hilarious with a large serving of sex. Using that recipe Judd Apatow produced or wrote a bucket of consistently engaging comedies the past ten years: Knocked Up, Freaks and Geeks, The […]
The Smackdown Movies offer the risky pleasure of transporting us someplace beyond our regular lives. Often they touch down in Las Vegas. It’s a neon backdrop for stories that are fun (Oceans 11), quirky and […]
The Power of Two The Oscars did not break form. They joined the enthusiastic worldwide embrace of No Country For Old Men. Critics and the creative community bestowed 79 awards on this film and another […]
In a lot of ways, the Oscars and other awards shows are really the Ultimate Smackdown, although a little cluttered for our tastes, given our preference for mano-a-mano film-on-film violence. Still, now that the writers […]
If you’re looking for a film that will make you feel a little better about your own life, try either of these. They’ll also make you feel better about the “human spirit” and other noble thoughts but, basically, you will realize that all the crap you complain about every day really is just crap and that you should take a chill pill and try to realize how good things really are. Both “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “My Left Foot” which preceded it by almost two decades feature lead characters who are suffering through horrific physical challenges which make it nearly impossible for them to communicate but, because they are just as alive inside their brains as any of us and maybe more so, they rise above their fear, pain and sadness to communicate anyway. In the end, in both films, it turns out to be less about what they say than the fact that they said anything at all that is so inspirational.
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The Smackdown We can probably all agree that children should be protected from seeing and hearing and thinking about sexual contacts in the world around them and yet, sometimes they aren’t, sometimes they get a […]
The Smackdown The pregnancy genre is not a new one, but two of this year’s best movies have managed to present it in a new and novel way. Juno tells the story of a teenage […]
The Smackdown Win big, lose big. That’s the risk facing filmmakers seeking to do more than entertain. Joel and Ethan Coen take chances and the results are always interesting, sometimes great (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, […]
The Smackdown It’s easy to admire virtue and nobility. Possessing either can be difficult. Maybe that’s why our movies seem to feature five Norman Bates and ten Gordon Gekkos for every George Bailey or Atticus Finch. […]
The Smackdown American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce defined a lawyer as someone “skilled in the circumvention of the law” and he presciently wrote this a century before either of our two films hit the […]
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