My Dog Tulip
Less Flowery Than the Title Implies Featuring Voices of: Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave Written by Robert Patrick J.R. Ackerley was an English writer who, in 1956, wrote a book about his German Shepherd, Tulip. A veteran of the great war, the old gentleman confided in no one, living out his years in pensive solitude, until, one particular day, he brought a scruffy, misbehaving canine home. The cartoon – made for adults, the...
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 Sicilian Girl
Diary of a Vengeful Kid Starring: Veronica D’Agostino, Gerard Jugnot By Robert Patrick “The Sicilian Girl” has me rubbing my temple in confusion. The film’s story, one of linear Mafioso roots, isn’t too perplexing by any means. A girl witnesses her father’s death, wails in agony, pumps her fist in an obligatory and ubiquitous cry of vengeance. If you are confounded by this, you probably haven’t seen too many crime films. You are...
The Wildest Dream
Wikipedia is a Better Route Starring: Conrad Anker, Liam Neeson’s voice By Robert Patrick George Mallory sunk his feet into the snow on Mount Everest several times before his ill-fated journey to the peak of the earthy, monolithic beast in June of 1924. The Englishman, an adventurer of the highest spirit, would use his weathered paws to scale over walls of rock and ice. Together with fellow mountaineer Andrew Irvine, the perilous pair...
Countdown to Zero
Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin By Robert Patrick Devastation! Destruction! Atrocity fueled anarchy! Nuclear warheads! Danger, Will Robinson! These are all the things that spring from the screen of Magnolia Pictures’ newest documentary, “Countdown to Zero,” in which scholars of disaster straighten their bow ties, clean their eyeglasses, then astound audiences with information that is over half a century old. The statistics are...
Great Directors
A Mediocre Film About Fantastic Filmmakers Starring: David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci By Robert Patrick Filmmaker Angela Ismailos ropes up her favorite directors, culls inspired interviews from them, chops up the footage with a butcher’s cleaver, then splays the expositions out for the audience to devour. The documentary runs amuck with a flurry of waving hands, wafting embers from lit cigarettes, and talking-heads that do nothing but...
Stonewall Uprising
Not About the Civil War General By Robert Patrick There has never been a question that the solidification of gay rights has been an uphill battle. The skewed laws of America have been, without a doubt, a repository for the unjust repression of what should be basic moral principles. None of this, of course, is necessarily surprising, especially in the gelatinous paranoia of mid-century America. But “Stonewall Uprising,” a monolithic...
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...
