Quickie Review: The Sessions
The Sessions, a new film starring John Hawkes and the beautiful Helen Hunt, is one of the finest films I have seen this year. Unsentimental, cute, and beautifully orchestrated, it’s a solemn take on love based on an unlikely premise. Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), a polio survivor, spends the majority of his life in an iron lung. He has no control over his body besides his face and requires around the clock care. At thirty-eight, tired of the longing and rejection that comes with his…
Quickie Review: Submarine
Submarine is a charming film from British TV star and director Richard Ayoade (Moss from the IT Crowd) that you should see. This is his first feature—but you wouldn’t know it. The script, the direction, even the sets look like the work of a mature director. Yet it is to Ayoade’s credit that he makes an old genre, coming of age, something far more new and exciting; could it be that same inexperience working in his favor? Submarine tells the story of a fifteen-year old…
Quickie Review: Win Win
First, before beginning, a note about bringing your five-year old children to R-rated movies. Fine, this movie didn’t deserve an R-rating. The worst it got was a little bad language. But, really, your child is going to be bored out of his mind anyway. Is Mars Needs Moms that bad? Can you not afford a babysitter? If you really can’t afford a babysitter, you’re probably in the same boat as Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti). This father of two small children is having a considerably hard…
Reporting Live from Palm Springs
Believe it or not, the best place to see foreign films in LA isn’t some snobby west side movie theatre but the Palm Springs International Film Festival. This was my second year at the fest, and I am always blown away by the breadth and the quality of the programming. 69 countries are represented by 169 films in all of nine days (can that even be right?). I don’t much care for the celebrity aspect of the festival, I even stay away from the buzzier…
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