![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() Ron Howard takes on Moby Dick, starring Chris Hemsworth, in the poorly titled but highly accomplished In the Heart of the Sea. It plays like a 19th century Jaws, albeit with a giant Sperm Whale seeking vengeance on puny humans instead of a Great White Shark. It also challenges 21st century sens…
WikChip Video
Whales were considered sea monsters
|
||||||
![]() Mike Webster was a hero of mine, at a time when heroes were very, very influential in a young man’s life. Iron Mike Webster snapped the ball to Terry Bradshaw in four Super Bowls, all of which the Steelers won – my Steelers. He famously wore short-sleeves and no arm-pads to not get grabbed by def…
WikChip Video
ABC News covers Concussion
|
||||||
![]() The Big Short isn’t the Big Lie, but isn’t far from it either. The government hides just offscreen in Adam McKay’s seriocomic docudrama about the epic falsehoods that consumed the banking industry in 2008. Falsehoods one and two were Washington’s ability to safely stimulate homeownership amo…
WikChip Video
Margot Robbie in a bubblebath
|
||||||
![]() Nina Simone’s name and presence had occasionally penetrated my consciousness and always piqued my interest. Happily, this well done documentary finally brought her consequential music and politics alive. Dubbed the High Priestess of Soul, she was a unique and uniquely transfixing artist, fusin…
WikChip Video
Liz Garbus on her Nina Simone doc
|
||||||
![]() A moviestar who directs himself playing an iconic figure in a dramatic biopic has a fool for a leading-man. Don Cheadle provides proof of this as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, following in the footsteps of Kevin Spacey, who stubbed his toe directing himself as Bobby Darin in the similarly flawe…
WikChip Video
Kind of Blue is Kind of Perfect
|
||||||
![]() Even the great Maggie Smith can’t save The Lady in the Van. Let’s repeat: Dame Maggie can’t save it! Perhaps that’s because she plays an angry old woman who’s beyond saving, sad as that common sight is. Disclosure: I saw The Lady in the Van on the little tilt-down screens of a 737. It kind…
WikChip Image
Dame Maggie gets wasted.
|
||||||
![]() Harry Potter echoes throughout The Man Who Knew Infinity, the biopic of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a math wizard from humble circumstances who rose to prominence at an opulent and august English institution. Set in the ornate halls of 1910s-era Trinity College, it profiles an amazingly able – and rea…
WikChip Video
Who was Ramanujan? Math Wizard
|
||||||
![]() Engaging and true against-all-odds tale about 4 men who survived on the capsized trimaran Rose-Noelle for 119 days in 1989. As it was at the time, it was hard to believe, but truth is stranger than fiction; or so they say. Dynamite job by the cast conveying what it must have been like to float a… |
||||||
![]() National Lampoon – the maidenhead of post-modern comedy – was the ultimate risqué magazine for “well-to-do nobodies” in the Seventies. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon lists in its title four conditions associated with the Lampoon, another being being ROFL. This gr…
WikChip Video
Doug Kenney, comedy genius
|
||||||
![]() Joy became more about Jennifer Lawrence than about Joy Mangano, the subject of this imaginative biopic. Even more, it became about JLaw reuniting with Bradley Cooper & Robert De Niro in a David O. Russell movie. Coming just three years after their Silver Linings Playbook…
WikChip Video
The real Joy talks about the movie Joy.
|