REVIEW: Ball of Fire [1941]

“Don’t tell me the jive session has beat off without baby!” With the likes of His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and Bringing Up Baby, it may seem odd that my first foray into Howard Hawks‘ oeuvre would be the screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Considering I’m criminally behind on catching up with the cinematic 40s and 50s, it is. Co-conceived and -scripted by Billy Wilder, this hyper-real world contains more than just a passing similarity to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Between mentioning the Disney film…

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Posterized Propaganda February 2012: The Dreadful and the Dread Inducing

“Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” is a proverb whose simple existence proves the fact impressionable souls will do so without fail. This monthly column focuses on the film industry’s willingness to capitalize on this truth, releasing one-sheets to serve as not representations of what audiences are to expect, but as propaganda to fill seats. Oftentimes they fail miserably. And we’re back after ignoring a month where the most interesting poster was Liam Neeson‘s face washed out in white. I’m not saying February is any better—because it’s not—but at…

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REVIEW: Haywire [2012]

“Oh, God. There’s a deer in the car.” If not for the cast list, I would treat Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire as the newest entry to the experimental, off-the-beaten path section of his oeuvre. Without mentioning the larger scale Che—which is quite possibly his least mainstream film of the aughts—this quiet actioner fits right in as a sibling to Bubble and especially The Girlfriend Experience by using an untrained dramatic actress inside a plot playing to her strengths. Mixed Martial Arts fighter Gina Carano won’t be winning awards for her thespian…

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REVIEW: Man on a Ledge [2012]

“I can see his leg shaking from here” I’ll give TV movie scribe Pablo F. Fenjves light applause for hooking me during the first two thirds, but the real kudos go to documentarian Asger Leth and his ability to make even the implausibly contrived and impossibly far-fetched finale not take away from the entertaining little gem his fiction debut Man on a Ledge surprisingly ends up being. It’s convenient, convoluted, and pretty hard to stomach in terms of realism, but something about the acting and sporadic bits of humor kept…

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REVIEW: 鋼の錬金術師 嘆きの丘(ミロス)の聖なる星 [Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos] [2011]

“The myths of the Milosian people are stained in blood” Anime truly is a breed of its own and a genre not to be trifled with by the weak at heart. Just take the popular saga of “Fullmetal Alchemist” and the amount of work created from Hiromu Arakawa‘s world. Spawning two separate television series adapted from the same original manga, both incarnations were also graced with a film to accompany their parallel journeys of the brothers Elric—Edward and Alphonse. Whereas Conqueror of Shamballa trailed the original run as a wrap…

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REVIEW: The Artist [2011]

“Farewell Norma. I never loved you.” It all starts with a kiss for the cameras and the dot of an eyeliner pen. From there a star is born in the form of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) while her accidental impetus to become an actress ends up an industry dinosaur of a bygone era overnight. Silent Hollywood’s finest actor from Kinograph Pictures, George Valetin (Jean Dujardin), wakes one day to find himself at a crossroads of cinematic history with the transition to Talkies forcing him into the background where once only…

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REVIEW: Underworld: Awakening [2012]

“My heart isn’t cold, it’s broken” I like dark, sci-fi actioners and I’m unafraid to admit it. I’ve seen every Underworld and Resident Evil in the theatre and anticipate continuing that trend until their respective series die. My interest in each comes from different motivations, though. No matter how cheesy and overly stylish the vampire versus lycan war gets, it retains its intriguing mythology as a backbone to the carnage. On the flip side, Alice’s adventures against Umbrella ratchet up the aggression for non-stop fight choreography deflecting from the fact…

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REVIEW: The Interrupters [2011]

“Tell my mom I said hi” Until you’ve been there, you can’t understand. This is the theory behind those who call themselves The Interrupters in Steve James‘ new documentary. A group of former high ranking gang members from the streets of Chicago, these men and women meet to brainstorm and come up with solutions to the rampant violence destroying the youth of their city. They have joined together to become the initial transmission of interruption into conflicts containing the potential to explode into a powderkeg of blood over as little…

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DESIGN: FC Buffalo – Our City, Our Sport, Our Club

The email said, “My idea is pretty simple and I know you can make it kick butt.” So I had to take the job. It was Nick Mendola and FC Buffalo looking to get a t-shirt made with the text, “Our City, Our Sport, Our Club”. The concept called for making the first ‘O’ a buffalo, the second a soccer ball, and the third FC Buffalo’s crest. After playing with a few fonts, I decided I wanted the design to be compressed letters to offset the more wide icons juxtaposed…

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REVIEW: Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey [2011]

“Kevin comes alive through Elmo” I was a Jim Henson kid growing up in the 80s. The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and “The Jim Henson Hour” were staples in my household and I even made my parents take me to see The Witches theatrically at eight. But where I enjoyed the stories and fantastical places his characters took me, Kevin Clash took a shine to the full theatricality of this genius. As a high school kid in Baltimore he hand-sewed his own puppets after watching Henson explain how on TV, performed…

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REVIEW: The Empty Playground [2010]

“I can’t get you out of my mind” You could learn a whole lot about a person by showing them Phil Giordano‘s The Empty Playground and asking what he/she thought. Are you one who sees the good in people and metaphors of a lost child unable to be saved or does your cynical nature overpower to view a pedophile never able to assimilate back into society as the mark of what he’s done remains plastered in his eyes? Depicting a middle-aged gentleman named Jack (Marty Lodge) alone in his van…

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