8 years ago
All posts by Andy Crump
“Final Girl” Has A Crippling Lack of Imagination
Have you ever sat through a movie so ponderous and pointless that you felt the minutes ticking by as your patience slowly dwindled to zero? That’s more or less the experience of watching Tyler Shields’ immeasurably boring Final Girl, a film injudiciously stitc...
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“I Am Chris Farley” Avoids Exploring The Man’s Dark Side
Toward the end of I Am Chris Farley, Brent Hodge’s biography of the late, great comic force of nature, Bob Odenkirk measures the tragic circumference of Farley’s death in one quote: "It's just rare that a person has that much joy, and brings that much happines...
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“Paulo Coelho’s Best Story” Is Too Trite To Be His Best
Brazilian renaissance man Paulo Coelho has lived a life best described as quixotic. He’s well-known for penning The Alchemist, a slim tome that’s become the most widely translated novel by a living author. Left in the margins of his literary success are a vari...
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“Big Significant Things” Is Kind of a Mess, In A Good Way
Channeling its theme of millennial ennui and disaffection, Bryan Reisberg’s handsomely crafted indie road trip comedy Big Significant Things has little to say, but says it with wit and style. Reisberg doesn’t pretend to have the answers, which doesn’t feel lik...
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In Session: Talent Worth Watching In “Court”
Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court is the writer-director’s first feature, but it’s so accomplished that he might fool you into thinking that he’s been doing this for years. Partly, that’s a credit to his technique and his craft. Tamhane favors a style that emphasizes ...
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“The Gallows”
Congratulations, The Gallows: You’re this year’s As Above, So Below, which means that you’re this year’s Chernobyl Diaries, and on and on throughout found footage’s rich history as a hotbed for horror hack-work. (For every Trollhunter, there’s an Apollo 18. Fo...
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“Stung”
In the vast and varied catalog of horror film villains, giant bugs have historically been paid little respect. Big damn insects tend to be B-movie fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000 or drive-ins. If Benni Diez’s Stung proves anything, it’s that relegation...
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“Ted 2”
Asking whether we really needed a sequel to 2012’s Ted is almost unfair to Ted 2. Sequels, follow-ups, and part twos (and threes and fours) make up an ever-increasing percentage of our moviegoing diet these days. Questioning their necessity has nearly become r...
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“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”
There’s an art to manipulating a moviegoing audience. Every movie practices this art. Filmmakers have to sculpt their viewers’ responses to their work, even if only to a limited extent; some do it less than others, or perhaps they do such a good job exploiting...
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“Set Fire to the Stars”
Like all projects based around the lives of actual human beings, the Dylan Thomas biopic Set Fire the Stars has to contend with the problem of dramatizing reality. “This happened,” the biopic tells us, but savvy viewers know that even the best biopics tend to ...
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