The Swiss seem like such nice, friendly, polite people. Fine chocolates. Precision clocks. Sharp knives. Impeccable tidiness. Fondue.
Southern Comforts: The Sun Never Sets on Love at the ICT
At the least, Southern Comforts stands out as a declaration that the capacity to love has no expiration date. But the play and its production at the International City Theatre in Long Beach rates as more than a sly, sideways manifesto in rebuttal to society’s ageism.
Rango: High Plains Lizard
A chameleon with an identity crisis is just the sort of quirky, elevated premise that waits for a Hollywood studio to come around and take it down a few notches, preferably through the agency of a starry-eyed export from a sketch comedy show.
‘The Pinnacle Seven’: An Entertaining Climb Up the Peaks of Wishful Thinking
Conspiracy thrillers typically occupy the sinister, occasionally apocalyptic, spaces of the human mind. Jackie Richards’ self-billed political mystery offers a different kind of scheme, one as quaint as the romance of a workers’ revolution, only more twee: a bourgeois escapist fantasy rooted in a widely-shared frustration with the stalemated two-party system.
The BBC’s Sherlock: Thrilling But Not Quite Elementary
Swarmed as we are by television detectives cast from the mold of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creation — or, to be as rigidly precise as Holmes himself, cast from the mold established by Edgar Allen Poe in Murders in the Rue Morgue — a new Sherlock Holmes series set in modern times comes with a luggage room full of assumptions, expectations, opportunities and pitfalls.
‘True Grit’: Some Cattle, Mostly Hat
The Western today, like a lone tumbleweed, has the tendency of blowing into the movie-going public’s awareness, provoking a few comments for the sheer novelty of it, then blowing right on out in a return to the fringes of unfashionable genre movies.
Black Swan: Into the Art of Darkness
Aranofsky’s work, whose manipulations effortlessly and elegantly blur the line between reality and disturbed psyche to create escalating suspense and fascination, again proves him to be the singular kind of director whose vision is capable of overcoming skepticism over the film’s subject matter.
Fired up! Two Books Expose Lies About the Economy
It's hard not to think of economics without first thinking of Robert Nadeau (http://www.scientificamerican.com) pointing to the vast edifice of so-called economic science and crying out, “Emperor! Naked!” Even today it seems as if that most mysterious of mysteries — cloaked as it is by an impressive dictionary of words like collaterized debt obligations, capital gains tax and hedge funds — offers little improvement over past economists’ strategy of substituting economic variables in equations repurposed from obsolete theories of physics. But if the foggy science itself is bewildering, what are we to make of it when seen through the distorting lenses of politics and the media? Throw in ideology, reduced to the eternal and immature struggle between conservatives and liberals, and the result is a bloody nose for spectators.
L’Illusioniste: The Persistence of Nostalgia
A film like The Illusionist – not to be confused with the 2006 live-action feature starring Edward Norton – presents a challenge in connecting with audiences. Its nostalgia, emblematic of the past giving way to the future, is rooted in yet another staging of vaudeville’s death.
Tron: Legacy’ — Electrifies the Boys and Girls
Released in 1982, the original Tron movie has — until geek became chic and, more importantly, profitable — been the sort of quasi-obscure cult item dismissed as video game juvenilia with the same wave of the hand now reserved for comic book movies not directed by Christopher Nolan.