8 years ago
All posts by Charles Bramesco
Is “Pixels” The Worst Rom-Com of All Time?
This just in: Pixels, the latest half-hearted cinematic time-killer starring the sad sack once known as Adam Sandler, is bad. It is bad, bad, bad. The script adheres to no sense of internal logic; the film expects audiences to accept that Paul Blart, Mall Cop ...
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“Paper Towns” Is A Crap-Crossed Love Story
Audiences get quite a bargain when buying a ticket for Jake Schreier’s new YA lit adaptation Paper Towns. These lucky viewers will see two movies for the price of one. At a run time of approximately 105 minutes, the first is an insufferably pseudo-quirky recit...
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The Unbearable Sameness of “Ant-Man” and Marvel Movies
Hollywood churns out a lot of superhero movies, but then, they also churn out a lot of movies about, say, cops. Multiple times each year, multiplexes will run new releases about the boys in blue, and yet the public isn’t subjected to a deluge of thinkpieces ab...
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The Funny-As-Hell “Trainwreck” Is Anything But
“We all know one.” So goes the tagline for Trainwreck, comic phenom Amy Schumer’s debut starring vehicle with Judd Apatow. With the third season of Inside Amy Schumer in full swing and the comedian’s name seemingly plastered across the headline daily (sometime...
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Locked Up With The Too-Tidy “The Stanford Prison Experiment”
In the first week of any undergrad Introduction to Psychology course, professors will trot out one of two case studies. They can go with Stanley Milgram’s test on obedience and punishment (dramatized by the late Robin Williams in what must be one of the all-ti...
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“Minions”
Children, those little clay-lumps upon whom pop culture can imprint with unmatched ease, probably shouldn’t be allowed around Minions. The little yellow pill-shaped hellions that star in this spin-off of upstart animation studio Illumination’s runaway success ...
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“The Little Death”
In a scene deep into the second act of Australian comedy anthology The Little Death, a man and his girlfriend walk back to their car in a parking garage following a romantic dinner. They’re stopped by a pair of thugs who glower at them, take their wallets and ...
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“Dope”
In Rick Famuyiwa’s urban coming-of-age film Dope, sincere nerd Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his two best friends, 14% African jokester Jib (Tony Revolori) and sharp-witted lesbian Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), make references to all of the following: Rick Ross, Case...
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“We Are Still Here”
Culture, it’s said, moves cyclically. The generation of filmmakers who whiled away their childhoods sitting rapt before the hundredth replay of a John Carpenter film on VHS has come of age, and those hours spent glued to the TV have paid off. With The Guest an...
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“Barely Lethal”
In her breakthrough performance as Mattie Ross in the Coen Brothers’ 2010 adaptation of True Grit, Hailee Steinfeld wowed audiences with a steely reserve far beyond her then-13 years of age. For maintaining her character’s composure in a frontier crawling with...
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