8 years ago
All posts by Charles Bramesco
“Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon” Is A Flavorless, Unintelligent Trek
Reason #275839 why Aaron Sorkin’s mercifully short-lived series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip didn’t work out was its unduly inflated sense of importance. Everyone within the show spoke of the titular comedy institution with a hushed reverence usually reserved...
Read more →
“Dragon Blade” Is A Baffling Paradox
The collected forces of the Chinese entertainment economy entrusted Daniel Lee, director of the majestically incompetent historical epic Dragon Blade, with a $65 million budget for his newest feature. To provide some financial context, The Sparkle Roll Media C...
Read more →
“We Are Your Friends” Doesn’t Know Who It’s For
While the shiny beautiful people of Hollywood sip elaborate cocktails in their hilltop mansions, the common rabble toil away at crap day-jobs in the San Fernando Valley. As they live in the literal shadow of the lifestyle they covet, wide-eyed dreamers short o...
Read more →
“Z for Zachariah” Finds Virtue In Scaling Back
On paper, Z For Zachariah resembles a much larger operation than it turned out to be. Right off the bat, it’s an adaptation of post-apocalyptic lit, an apparently boundless well into which Hollywood has plunged its bucket quite frequently over the past few yea...
Read more →
“American Ultra”, Like A Stoner, Has Trouble Focusing
The trouble with Mike Howell, the ambition-deficient convenience store clerk that Jesse Eisenberg plays in the middling American Ultra, is that he keeps receiving bad news while high. Bad news—like, say, the news that the United States government has sent high...
Read more →
“Phoenix” Is The Cure for The Common Holocaust Movie
On Ricky Gervais’ sorely missed HBO sitcom Extras, Kate Winslet makes an appearance as a funhouse-mirror version of herself while shooting a Holocaust picture. In an extremely candid moment between takes, she confides in Gervais’ sad-sack Z-lister Andy Millman...
Read more →
“Straight Outta Compton” Is Overstuffed And Exhilarating At The Same Time
In one scene, deep in the overstuffed second act of F. Gary Gray’s ambitious N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, Ice Cube (played by O’Shea Jackson Jr., the real-life fruit of Mr. Cube’s loins) goes to settle a dispute with his manager. The overcooked noodle...
Read more →
Modernly Retro: “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” Updates the Past for the Present
Contrary to what so-called “scientists” might claim, the past is not a static thing. It’s changing all the time, and not just because Google’s new Alphabet rigamarole is a cover-up for the debut of commercially available time travel. The past exists only insof...
Read more →
Productive Failure: Three New Films Allow Female Characters to Fail
Like the Pacific Theater in World War II, America’s literal movie theaters have become the site of crucial battles in the cultural war for womankind’s dignity and agency. With every new month’s slate of releases, we get a wave or two of incisive assessments ov...
Read more →
Locked Between Professional and Personal: On “The End of the Tour”
Early reports on James Ponsoldt’s sensitive, earnest The End Of The Tour tended to describe the film as something of a David Foster Wallace biopic--a notion abhorrent in literary circles that still hold up Wallace as an untouchable, multifaceted genius. Those ...
Read more →
