Into the Woods
♫ This Is Bad, Please Help ♫ Starring: Meryl Streep, Chris Pine Review written by Robert D. Patrick It’s a grisly business to adapt a musical to screen, there is no doubt, particularly when the source material is beloved. Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods shoehorns a myriad of fairy tale characters into an allegoric hornet’s nest. Culled from various stories, everything from Little Red Riding Hood to Jack and the...
Les Misérables
Historical Poverty All Up In Your Grill Review written by Andrew Younger Starring: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe In the opening sequence of director Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the musical Les Miserables, the French Tricolour–whose faded bars of blue, white, and red, symbolize the idealism of the French Revolution–is trampled by shackled prisoners marching in unison. With the restoration of the French monarchy described...
Bran Nue Dae
And Now…The Anti-Musical! Starring: Rocky McKenzie, Geoffrey Rush By Robert Patrick Your friend, who has made some questionable recommendations in the past, tells you, very feverishly, that you need to go on a blind date. Your friend spits out words such as “mesmerizing” and “endearing” when he describes, in a fit of excitement, the person he is hooking you up with. You concede to this bonanza of enthusiasm, citing exhaustion,...
Nine
Asphyxiated to Death by Feather Boas Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard By Robert Patrick Rob Marshall’s loud, bombastic, incurably busy musical is a cacophony of ideas and blaring horns. The songs in the film sound, to be quite blunt, like mortar fire. Too many wordy verses, too many goofy choruses. “My husband is a director; he makes movies”, wails out the normally magnificent Marion Cotillard. Marshall’s last musical...
Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
The Needle and the Record Featuring: Anita O’Day, Buddy Bregman By Allie Willis As a relative rookie to jazz music, I was slightly surprised at how instantaneously my feet seemed to disconnect from my concrete self, how suddenly they were captured by Anita O’Day’s smoky and sultry rhythms, only to be reluctantly released after an hour and a half toe-tapping routine by the ending credits. A captivating documentary detailing the...
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Jack White Was in this Movie Briefly [Originally published: East County Herald] Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story By Robert Patrick Comedies, as I’m told, rely on little subtext. To make an efficient comedy, though I’ve never practiced the art of filmmaking, I assume would require a sense of humor, an earnest light-hearted sensibility, or, if the movie calls for it, a witty narrative. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story presents me with a...
