by Nicole Powers
“We’ve had 18 years of climate conferences…”
– Ondi Timoner
In her latest documentary, Cool It!, two-time Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning director Ondi Timoner (We Live In Public and Dig!) sets forth the case for lowering the temperature of the global warming debate, and offers pragmatic solutions to what former Vice President and preeminent environmentalist Al Gore considers a moral issue.
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by Fred Topel
“I do think there’s a real world parallel.”
– Gavin Hood
Gavin Hood became a political filmmaker with his very first movie. In Tsotsi he attempted to redeem a fictional criminal teen in South Africa, Hood’s country of origin. He tackled American foreign policy, for better or worse, in his follow-up film, Rendition. The ensemble drama about our government’s often overlooked policy of taking terror suspects to foreign countries where torture could be conducted legally, was not a hit financially or critically, but it asked the questions Hood wanted to ask.
The X-Men series has always kept politics in the metaphorical forefront. The comic books portrayed mutants as a persecuted minority. The films featured politicians proposing policy to round up mutants, exterminate them or even try to “cure” them, raising the moral question of who decides what needs to be fixed.
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by Nicole Powers
“I think it’s a question of vengeance.”
– Leonard Nimoy
The makers of Star Trek can thank their lucky stars that the spacetime continuum isn’t thought to be very continuous these days. The new Star Trek film turns its back on everything that Back To The Future ever taught us about time, and embraces the possibilities of infinite alternate universes that come along with the relatively recent science of string theory.
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by A.J. Focht
Today’s media is overrun with rehashed tales of old myths. It is nearly impossible to come across a fantasy story that doesn’t re-use mythical beings. Vampires, werewolves, and zombies all come from traditional myths and plague our airwaves and book stores; every author is looking for a way to put their own spin on this time tested material.
Some authors are very good at taking traditional myths and adapting them, whereas others should be hanged, drawn, and quartered for their crimes against them. Most myths have grey areas that can be adapted, but they all have their canon – lists of facts and pieces of the myth that cannot be changed without altering that which is intrinsic to it. When an author starts altering these facts they upset the status quo. They weaken not only the fabric of the mythological being – but our ability to suspend our disbelief. This leaves their final product looking like a cheap bastardization of the original.
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by Brett Warner
This Friday, auteur filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s latest psychological and emotional rollercoaster Black Swan will be dancing across a handful of movie theater screens for a limited release. The film stars Natalie Portman as a hard working young ingénue who lands the lead in a new production of Swan Lake only to find herself haunted by her more sensual competition (played by Mila Kunis) and — in true Aronofsky fashion — lots of other creepy shit. The two stars were coached and choreographed by Mary Helen Bowers and New York City Ballet principal Benjamin Millepied respectively and underwent months of rigorous training necessary to replicate an art form that — for professionals — requires years of intense, borderline obsessive dedication. (I’ve dated two former ballerinas – trust me, they don’t fuck around.) Black Swan should have Aronofsky fans geeking out to the nth degree, though it’s not exactly the first film about a ballet company to deal with themes of obsession, jealousy, sexuality, and, well… other creepy shit.
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by Ryan Stewart
“Movies don’t matter anymore.”
-Steven Soderbergh
“If I’m such a commodity, how come nobody went to see The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh asks at one point during our conversation. He’s being half-facetious and half-serious when posing the question. At 46, Soderbergh has already earned every professional accolade a film director can, including the Palme D’Or for his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, and the Oscar for his drug war opus Traffic. His frequent collaborators now include George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt (who is starring in his forthcoming adaptation of the controversial state-of-baseball tome Moneyball). Yet Soderbergh remains a stubbornly anonymous filmmaker, difficult to nail down in terms of style or subject, removed from the public eye, and without a cult following that can be roused to seek out his smaller, more experimental films.
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by Andrew E. Konietzky
I was again asked by the beautiful staff over at SuicideGirls to create a Top 10 Holiday Films list. As with my Horror Film Top 10, it is impossible to list all the applicable films or put them into some definitive order. I must once again post a small disclaimer; we all have our Holiday favorites we visit each year. You may prefer having a drink in Dorry’s Tavern with Mrs. Deagle in Gremlins. Others may want to attend the Christmas party at Nakatomi Plaza in Diehard. And Buddy the Elf, is already calling me a cotton-headed ninny-muggins for not mentioning Bad Santa, Better Off Dead, Dutch, or The Ref. I know I’m going to miss some, but here are 10 of my peppermint and gingerbread sprinkled seasonal faves.
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