“The Duchess”: The World’s Most Un-Feministy Feminist
Thursday, September 18th, 2008

It’s been a big year for women. From the 18 million ceiling cracks to the conflagration of hockey moms on the national stage, you can’t help but hear the crunch of female empowerment. Which sounds like the perfect entrée for The Duchess (opens Fri. Sept. 19), a film about one of 18th Century Britain’s most [...]

“Teeth”: The Beast Within Eats the Boys Without
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

“We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead” Warner Bros. president of production Jeff Robinov reportedly decreed last year, after Jodie Foster’s The Brave One sank like congealed lard in the gut of domestic box offices. Just like that, half of the population is banned from headlining films (with no mention of [...]

“The Mist”: Tragedy Porn, In Action
Thursday, November 15th, 2007

There’s a growing genre in Hollywood that we like to call “tragedy porn.” We describe it as follows: just as porn films introduce characters for the sole purpose of getting them naked and screwed, so does tragedy porn (Crash and Babel come to mind) march out a cast simply to have the worst possible things [...]

“In The Valley of Elah”
Thursday, September 13th, 2007

In 2006, director Paul Haggis struck Oscar gold with Crash, a unique brand of hot-button tragedy porn that reduced race in America to a glamorized, sanctimonious mess. So it’s only logical that his next Academy Award-ready ensemble cast film would tackle Iraq. Bu this time, though the buttons are hot and the hand is heavy, [...]

“Sicko”: Even the Billionaires Will Die Someday
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

It was a bizarre merging of worlds at the New York SiCKO premiere, a theater packed with media A-listers and twenty-something billionaires watching tales of healthcare woe elbow-to-elbow with activists in matching slogan t-shirts. “Could it have been any more didactic?” sniffed one media patriciate as chanting nurses paraded through the lobby during the closing [...]