In fact it just may be just that: all bad. Fighting the urge to leave the theater from the get-go, I waited ...... READ MORE
One night I caught Meryl Streep on the Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show talking about how she learned real guitar chords and sang the actual vocal parts for her new film Ricki and the Flash, which is about an aging rock singer alienated from her former family and needing to make amends. As usual, Fallon slapped his table and gushed (this schtick is getting really tired). Having made a documentary about a female rock singer, I was skeptical, but thought, how bad could this movie be? America’s greatest living actress plays a rock singer in a roadhouse band backed by Rick Springfield and some fine musicians — the film couldn’t be a complete disaster. Yes, it is.
In fact it just may be just that: all bad. Fighting the urge to leave the theater from the get-go, I waited ...... READ MORE
0 Comments
Since Poor Cow nearly 50 years ago Ken Loach has remained committed to social realist films about characters who survive on the edges of history. Perhaps that interest in the political and the marginal explains why his films are too little seen in this country. He often works in television and his last release, Looking for Eric, was about a working class man’s obsession with the soccer star Eric Cantona. That story was amusing and informative — I knew nothing about the sports star. In 2007, The Wind That Shakes the Barley featured Cillian Murphy as a medical student who becomes swept away by the Irish fight for independence in 1919-1921, and the ensuing civil war from 1922-1923. That was a rousing tale that made history personal though it was not entirely clear about facts. The title came from the famous Irish song:
|
|