I am a foodie. If you put something in front of me and tell me it’s food, I will eat it. Food might be the only thing besides my family that I love as much as movies. So when food and movies come together, it’s something that I cannot miss. There is something about showing …
Category: Reviews
Cabaret: Another example of Storytelling Sans Dialogue
There are many devices in the toolbox of a screenwriter that allow him or her to reveal major story points or character revelations without the use of dialogue. One such device is Planting and Payoff. Planting and Payoff is the technique where the writer plants an idea or a conflict or a prop or some …
The Wolf of Wall Street: Over the Top and Ostentatious, But That’s the Point
I saw The Wolf of Wall Street earlier this week, and have been wanting to blog about it since. I’ve not read any other reviews of it, but anecdotally, the people whom I know that have seen it felt it to be over the top and ostentatious. I have to agree with them after seeing …
Frozen: The Good and the Not-As-Good
I finally saw Frozen last night and I found it to be entertaining with magnificent art direction, a stunning production design and beautiful animation. As they always do, even when the story isn’t great, the artists at Disney produced work that is really second to none. While this film has a good story, however, I …
Today’s Question: Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?
This has been going around in my circle the past couple of years, and I’ve been hearing it even more this year. There is a cantankerous debate going around about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. On the surface it seems like a ridiculous debate to have, but it does stir up questions about …
The legend continues…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elczv0ghqw0
Top 5 Baseball Movies
There are a couple of sports, namely baseball and boxing, that seem to lend themselves very well to the arts of storytelling and film making. Certainly there have been plenty of films about football (The Longest Yard, Remember the Titans), hockey (Miracle, Youngblood), basketball (Hoosiers, White Men Can’t Jump), and soccer (Victory), and there have …
“The Croods” – An Excellent Family Film
Full disclosure: I work for DreamWorks Animation, although I didn’t do very much work on The Croods. That being said, this is a wonderful film for family audiences for a number of reasons. Like all DreamWorks Animation films, the artistic vision in this film is incredible. An entire world was created that is at once …
Lincoln: A Case Study on Amazing Dialogue
If Tony Kushner takes home the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Lincoln, he will do it largely on strength of the superior dialogue that he wrote for that script. From the plain-spoken dialect he gave to Abraham Lincoln to the sophisticated euphemisms he gave to William Seward to finally the absolute …
Django Unchained: My Favorite Film of the Year, But…
With the Academy Award nominations out today (and I admit that I still need to see some of the films), I wanted to spend some time talking about the film that is my favorite of the year so far, and that is Django Unchained. However, rather than sing its praises and extol the virtues of …