Screen
Tame, lame video game
Glam it up all you want: Ender’s Game is about a kid playing a high-stakes video game. And before Fred Savage-fueled the visions of The Wizard go Super- Mario-dancing in your head, you should know this features absolutely no Power Glove love...
The burden of actual Christianity
Most praise for writer/director Jesse Moss’s documentary, The Overnighters, has rightly been focused on its Steinbeckian nature and explosive revelations about struggling workers in North Dakota. That wasn’t the big takeaway for me. The big takeaway for me was how ...
The way of the future
If all had gone according to plan, the internet would have made a rather inauspicious debut, but perhaps it wasn’t meant for modesty. On...
Numerically accurate
Among the last words of 1960s The Magnificent Seven is this Nietzschian fortune cookie quote: “We lost. We’ll always lose.” At the end of...
BolderLife Festival delivers films, speakers and theater
As the BolderLife Festival enters its second year on the scene, the film/theater festival will take on an array of taboo topics, giving audiences a platform to engage in in-depth discussions...
All for none
The Alexandre Dumas book The Three Musketeers still offers a thrilling adventure with the coming-of-age tale of D’Artagnan leaving home to join up with the fabled Musketeers, acting in the service of King Louis XIII against the evil Cardinal Richelieu. Sword fights, ...
I’ll have what he’s having
Just what is Israeli cuisine? When Michael Solomonov sits down at a Tel Aviv restaurant and asks for something small, something special, he gets...
Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar channel Jack Kerouac’s thesis
I remember my first experience with Jack Kerouac. I was on a classic literature binge; the more risqué, the better. I was in the midst of reading everything I could afford with my mangled selection of bills and picked up a copy of On the Road. All I knew about the ...
Bloody interesting
Early on in the derivative but fairly absorbing blur titled Safe House, set in Cape Town, South Africa, Denzel Washington’s Tobin Frost, a spy in from the cold, is brought to a Central Intelligence Agency safe house so that he can be asked a few questions about the ...
Celebrating Stan
Watching a Stan Brakhage film is like dreaming with your eyes open. The
collision of colors and shadows, images overlapping images, distortions and
rapid-fire editing imprints...
