REVIEW: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part [2019]

Listen to the music. A film like The LEGO Movie is a once-in-a-decade type achievement (so to see its filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller also write/produce another once-in-a-decade feat with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse only shows how inventive and original the two are). It daring to use its subject matter’s tactility and utility rather than pretend its nothing more than aesthetic was an ingenious choice, the surprise lifting of the curtain to reveal a human element behind the characters’ machinations the stuff of legend. So the inevitable demand for…

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The 91st Oscars recap through tweets …

What a wild ride this Oscars season has been. After so much recent talk about inclusivity and a changing of the guard, it was bound to happen that we’d receive an awkward period of flux. There’s the young crowd cheering a Marvel Cinematic Universe chapter to the franchise’s first Best Picture nominee and the older sect feeling warm and gooey about a story pretending to talk about racism despite really just glossing over the struggle to say most racists are simply misunderstood until sharing a bucket of KFC with the…

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REVIEW: A Bread Factory, Parts One & Two [2018]

She left him an empty kitchen. My first internship in college was at a local arts museum—unpaid, experiential, and portfolio building. The establishment pretty much had a single full-time position and as artistic director she did pretty much everything from organizing exhibits, hiring community program teachers, stretching a miniscule state-funded and donation-driven budget, and whatever else you could think and not think an institution like this needed. My main job for credit was to design the show postcards and update the website, but being there also meant cleaning, mounting canvases,…

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REVIEW: Werk ohne Autor [Never Look Away] [2018]

Everything that’s true is beautiful. The thing that people who didn’t attend art school or don’t have a foundation in art history never understand is the reasoning behind postmodern art. They find it funny to reductively joke about how their three-year old child could net them a million dollars by scribbling on a canvas because they refuse to look beneath the surface and let the image speak as emotion through abstract form rather than some ingrained sense of realism. These artists had the skill to paint portraits but chose to…

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REVIEW: 2050 [2019]

You are a dirty manipulation of natural elements. There’s something endearing about a company manufacturing impossibly realistic “e-mates” (robotic companions programmed to be subordinate to your every whim whether task-driven, intellectual, or sexual) having a lo-fi TV-spot with 90s internet graphics and over-the-top infomercial testimonials from people stopped on the street. They’ve spent so much research and development on creating the perfect artificial human that it doesn’t matter if the screensaver on their in-house computers is a pixelated logo bouncing back and forth. The product literally sells itself by providing…

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Picking Winners at the 91st Annual Academy Awards

The 91st Annual Academy Awards hits airwaves Sunday, February 24th, 2019 at 8:00pm on ABC. For those handicapping at home, here are the guesses of Buffalo film fanatics Christopher Schobert, William Altreuter, and myself. Jared Mobarak: It’s the type of year where hashtags rhetoric simply won’t work. There’s just not one all encapsulating buzzword to touch upon the myriad problems these nominations face. What do you do when you have a film up for Best Picture that was directed by a known presumed sexual predator who was fired for not…

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REVIEW: Arctic [2019]

You’re not alone. All we have to guess the duration of time Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen) has been stranded alone in an icy wasteland nearby his crashed plane is the beard on his face. Even then we don’t know how long it was when he escaped the fuselage to pretend to have a starting point for anything that’s happening. The hash marks on his map might indicate days he’s gone out to spin his radio in hopes of hearing the ping of a green light making contact. The number of fish…

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REVIEW: How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World [2019]

There’s no better gift than love. It’s not often a studio as big as Dreamworks goes on record to say the third installment of a critically acclaimed series and box office success will be its last. Why paint yourself into a corner like that when the possibility for more is right at your fingertips? Dare I say the answer is integrity? I know. That’s not a word you hear much in Hollywood, but I have to believe it’s the reasoning behind Dean DeBlois‘ adaptation of Cressida Cowell‘s How to Train…

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REVIEW: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [1976]

Got the world by the balls. It’s a wild beginning with Cosmo Vittelli (Ben Gazzara) paying off a guy (Al Ruban‘s Marty) we assume let him borrow money to create his now successful club. Fast-forward to him introducing his seedy establishment’s main act in Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts) and the naked girls the audience has paid to see. Fast-forward again to one last payment to Marty. And give us one more to show Cosmo picking up Alice (Alice Friedland), Margo (Donna Gordon), and Rachel (Azizi Johari) in a limousine before…

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BERLINALE19 REVIEW: Kameni govornici [The Stone Speakers] [2019]

We need both spiritual and physical healing. Writer/director Igor Drljaca takes us on a contemplative tour through four towns in Bosnia-Herzegovinia with his documentary Kameni Govornici [The Stone Speakers]. We never hear him speak nor watch any of his subjects respond. All we hear are their disembodied words atop static portraits of them standing against the backdrop of their environment and all we see are the remnants of and creation from destruction post-World War II and civil ethnic unrest. There are the locals lamenting their dying land as its unable…

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REVIEW: Alita: Battle Angel [2019]

No one’s greater than the game. This is a film twenty years in the making despite James Cameron being attached from the start. The story goes that Guillermo del Toro introduced the King of Hollywood to Yukito Kishiro‘s manga Gunnm and he fell in love with the book enough to give it permanent placement on his docket. Alita: Battle Angel was first thought to begin production after the demise of Cameron’s television show “Dark Angel” only to have him decide something else was more pressing. Then came the secretive technological…

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