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(05/07/12 11:25pm)
The end is nigh. In only two excruciatingly short weeks I’ll be graduating from the Badger state’s finest institution of higher learning, finally earning that elusive descriptor of “real adult”—or more likely just “that depressed guy who drinks at the Union all day and pretends he’s still a student here, drowning his delusions in pint after pint of Spotted Cow.”
(04/30/12 3:02am)
The movie theater is an odd, unique place if you think about it, a remnant of a bygone era. Not just in the way they get us out of our house to take in a form of entertainment that could be readily consumed in the privacy and comfort of our own abode, but in the way that they are one of the last places where we willingly and voluntarily rest so much of our enjoyment upon the social courtesy of those around us. In the words of Scarlett O’Hara, it’s a matter of relying “upon the kindness of strangers.”
(04/24/12 1:17am)
My favorite film from this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival would have to be “Without” from writer/director Mark Jackson.
(04/16/12 2:35am)
The 2012 Wisconsin Film Festival is finally here, and featuring more films than ever over five days, from Wednesday through Sunday. The festival is a remarkable opportunity for Madisonians to see a side of the indie film world that usually requires living in L.A. or New York, right here in our own backyard. To get your cinematic tastebuds salivating, I’ve selected the five films from this year’s lineup that have intrigued me the most:
(04/09/12 12:35am)
YEAR 2005—so begins this year’s cinematic reimagining of the ’80s TV series “21 Jump Street” that launched the career of Johnny Depp. We open on metal-mouth-clad Jonah Hill donning a pair of those ridiculously, impractically baggy jeans from the turn of the (21st) century that have been all but forgotten in favor of their hipster antithesis, skinny jeans.
(03/28/12 1:41pm)
Andrew Neel’s “King Kelly” is a scorching, entertaining portrait of the YouTube generation.
(03/19/12 1:40am)
Hipster spring break is finally over. Brightly colored lens-less glasses from the night before—a riotous combination of the culminating night of South by Southwest and the city of Austin’s celebration of St. Patrick’s Day—have been traded out for oversized shades as everybody in the Austin airport sulks behind laptop screens and tall cups of coffee, disappointed that the party is over. Like kids waiting to be picked up by their parents at the end of summer camp.
(03/14/12 6:36am)
I still vividly remember going to see “Super Bad” back in my senior year of high school with my friends who were kind enough to chauffeur me to an opening-night screening in the wake of my wisdom-teeth removal. For weeks leading up to the release, I must have watched the unrated “redband” trailer on YouTube over a dozen times and was bombarded with the abbreviated television-ad even more frequently. When I finally got to see the flick, I obviously laughed my ass off (the pain killers from my surgery the day before made sure of that). However, I couldn’t help but feel like I would have enjoyed the movie significantly more if I had gone into it without seeing its best jokes excerpted and played out of context, over and over. I knew what to expect. I was perpetually waiting for the punch lines and the memorable plot points I knew were coming, trying to place them into the narrative still unfolding.
(03/13/12 3:34am)
South by Southwest’s film portion runs from March 9-17 this year, and the Cardinal’s own film columnist David Cottrell is in Austin taking it all in.
(03/05/12 2:58am)
This Friday I’ll be trading in the determinedly snowy streets of Madison for the sun-scorched roads of Austin, Texas to attend the 2012 South by Southwest festival with a few of my fellow Cardinal writers. Some call it the ultimate spring break for nerds, others a colossal celebration of all aspects of millennial culture. That includes music, technology and of course, where I will be most concerned, film. Considering that in 2007, SXSW served as the launching pad for the now ubiquitous social networking service Twitter, who knows what world-changing creative properties will debut this year, changing life, and our use of hash tags, as we know it forever.
(02/27/12 3:12am)
Awards season for movie releases has come and gone, along with the Oscars themselves. After catching up on the last few intriguing winners that you’ve yet to see, there won’t be much left playing in the theaters with any real draw for awhile. We’ve officially entered that barren cinematic tundra that comes around at the start of every year, that miserable period of arctic chill after all the winter magic has come and gone, leaving us with nothing but dirty snow and foul movies.
(02/20/12 2:13am)
Last week at Sundance Cinemas in Madison I witnessed a Norwegian
teenage girl engage in a seagull-killing rampage with a heavy
machine gun, a neurotic time machine inventor succumb to his OCD
and spend a year trying to make one rather unremarkable day in his
life perfect, two Irish estranged boyhood best friends reunite
after 25 years, a young German couple become embroiled in a secret
child-abduction ring after adopting a young Indian boy in Kolkata
and a young Irish lad brazenly defy the Catholic church in the name
of his one true love-football.
(02/13/12 3:58am)
Rooney Mara's turn as Swedish author Stieg Larsson's pierced,
tattoo-clad, anti-social Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's
American film adaptation of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" this
past December proved to be thoroughly enthralling-enough even to
land her a nomination for Best Actress at the 2012 Academy Awards
later this month. While Swedish actress Noomi Rapace got the first
crack at the character in the Danish film adaptations of Larsson's
Millennium trilogy, Mara managed to do the character better justice
in her portrayal by imbuing the ass-kicking, name-taking Salander
with the undertone of vulnerability that was missing from Rapace's
pure bad ass. Although this thread of humanity that Mara brings to
the role certainly complicates the character of Lisbeth Salander,
there is no doubt that she qualifies as the archetypal anti-hero, a
trope that is becoming more and more common in our culture.
(02/06/12 3:51am)
Blockbuster, Hollywood Videos, and other such brick-and-mortar
video rental providers have been closing up shop in droves across
the country over the past few years, simply out-competed by newer,
more convenient entertainment providers like Netflix and Redbox.
But the transition from these fading entertainment elites to the
new generation has gone anything but smoothly thanks to meddling
movie studios.
(01/30/12 4:37am)
By mid afternoon on the day of Oscar nomination announcements
last week, my Facebook wall was already being covered with bitter
and exasperated commentary on the Academy's nominee choices for the
2012 Academy Awards. One commenter summed up his displeasure with
the concise statement, "This was a terrible year in film."
(01/23/12 5:40am)
Anchoring your movie with a main character that is utterly
unlikable and almost completely devoid of admirable qualities is a
dangerous move. Aside from the innate human interest in just
desserts and seeing bad things happen to bad people, there aren't
many ways to win over an audience's interest, let alone affection,
with a portrait of a detestable human being.
(12/12/11 3:46am)
The end of the year, as well as the season's characteristic gold
rush of high-caliber cinema, is upon us. And what better time to
take in all the Oscar-minded flicks flooding into theaters or catch
up on gems passed over from earlier this year than the glorious
month of little-to-no responsibility that lies before us, just
beyond that abysmal week-which-shall-not-be-named. While there are
still a few films I'm highly anticipating over break-namely
"Shame," "Young Adult," "The Artist" and "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Spy"-I'd still like to take this time procrastinating from studying
to compile my top 10 of 2011 (so far) list.
(12/05/11 2:15am)
Cameron Crowe was once regarded as a seminal modern American
filmmaker. He spent the ‘80s and ‘90s producing some of the most
beloved films of those respective decades. In the 80's Crowe began
his film career by adapting a screenplay from his non-fiction book
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story," a chronicle of the
lives of six different teenagers, which Crow secretly re-enrolled
in high school at the age of 22 in order to capture.
(11/28/11 4:06am)
I can't count the number of times I've gone to see a film
adaptation of a book I've read only to be disappointed by the
result. It's lead to my policy of almost always seeing a movie
before I read its source material, simply because I know I'll
probably be more impressed with the latter. But this seemingly
inevitable degradation in the transition from paperback to film
stock is because writing a novel and writing a movie are two very
different processes.
(11/21/11 2:41am)
One of my favorite movies from the Sundance Film Festival this
year ended up being "Like Crazy." The screening I attended followed
just after director Jason Reitman ("Juno", "Up in the Air"), head
of the festival's Grand Jury this year, awarded the 2011 Sundance
Grand Jury Prize to "Like Crazy" director Drake Doremus.