Client 9
The Fantastic Mr. Fox Written by Robert Patrick George Fox aka Client-9 aka Eliot Spitzer has more pseudonyms than a cold war spy. These politicians, day traders and wall street moguls are so colorful they make a rainbow look monochrome. I think of comic-book characters like Two-Face and Kingpin, snickering and gallivanting around these crosshatched and seedy looking cities, wearing pinstriped suits that look like barcodes made out of...
Fair Game
More Watery Eyes Than a Benedryl Ad Starring: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn Written by Robert Patrick When I saw the press screening of this film, nearly a month ago, I had taken a chisel to my hippocampus to make sure I remembered everything I needed to remember when swinging my fingers around on my keyboard and writing this review. I watched the film in a pose not unlike The Thinker, a statue by Auguste Rodin. The story was an...
Nowhere Boy
Lennon: The Degrassi Years Starring: Aaron Johnson, Kristen Scott Thomas By Robert Patrick “Nowhere Boy” is unique in the fact that, while wholly accessible and about an interesting entity, it doesn’t necessarily need to be made. I know, you’re confused as to why a movie about the bespectacled poet laureate John Lennon doesn’t need to be made. The guy is a demigod! His face is interchangeable with the peace sign. These days a freehand...
The Social Network
Much Scarier than FEARnet Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield By Robert Patrick Jesse Eisenberg is terse and morose, his body structure narrow and curved like a bent wire hanger, as he curls his fingers above a keyboard. The sound of punched keys is both blunt and quick, his phalanges propelling like a bolt inside of a cattle gun, as his hands violently zap his targets before retracting. There is a particular violence to the...
The Radiant Child
The Feast and the Famish Featuring: Jean-Michel Basquiat By Robert Patrick Jean-Michel Basquiat was, for all purposes, completely innovative and untraditional. The street artist would jab and swoosh his brush against whatever canvas he deemed appropriate, whether it be the wall of a building or a sheet of paper, to create loud and bombastic pieces of chaotic and aggressive art. Art aficionados in his time generally shirked his work as...
I’m Still Here
The Scariest Film of the Year Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck By Robert Patrick “Towards the end, he kept saying, ‘I’m tired, I’m tired. I’m sick of it. I don’t want to do it anymore.’ But at a certain point you just don’t even want to listen to that; you just think it’s the ramblings of someone at the end of a shoot, so I kind of ignored it. But that was the only thing I heard about it. And then two months...
Mesrine: Killer Instinct
Slimiest Critters: Not the Brightest Starring: Vincent Cassel, Cecile De France By Robert Patrick Jacques Mesrine is the smarmiest, ugliest, cruelest baddie to fire up a cigarette. I would imagine if thrown into a pit of snakes, they would slither away from this guy. Vincent Cassel plays the sociopath Mesrine with a fiery temperament and a uneven stagger. The thespian goes head first into the syrupy world of guns, drugs, femme fatales...
Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
Robe > Snuggie Starring: Hugh Hefner, Gene Simmons By Robert Patrick Hugh Hefner’s name is synonymous with so much and yet so little. The impresario, cloaked in his now obligatory robe, is like a messiah atop a mystical mountain of excess and intrigue. How can a man whose face is so universally known have a soul so devastatingly enigmatic? In Brigitte Berman’s documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, the poobah of...
The Runaways
Unkempt Hair and Uncouth Behavior Starring: Dakota Fanning, Kristen Stewart By Robert Patrick Teenage girls, spiking their fingers against guitars, launch an assault on music. The year is nineteen-seventy-five, and music mogul Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), in attempting to pounce on innovation, safety-pins four girls, of varying backgrounds, into a punk-rock band called “The Runaways.” During the band’s short tenure...
Invictus
Matt Damon Has the Emotive Capacity of a Jack-o-lantern Starring: Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon By Robert Patrick The furrowed brow, unyielding scowl, and gray eyes are monolithic instruments in planting the iron and steel image of Clint Eastwood’s storied legacy into the soil of cinema. The 78 year-old auteur, whose ability to craft important films from behind the camera has taken a commonplace, creates another emotional picture with...
