Kill Your Darlings (2013)
Naive freshman Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) enrolls at Columbia University where he meets Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Edie Parker (Elizabeth Olsen).
Carr bribes an older man, David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) to write his papers by promising sexual favors, but when he grows bored with this relationship, he entices Ginsberg to a similar arrangement.
When Kammerer confronts him, Carr kills his longtime lover, arguing he acted in self-defense to protect himself from a sexual predator. However, Ginsberg, who suspects Carr acted intentionally, refuses to cooperate with his planned defense.
The writers and intellectuals featured in this film formed the core of The Beat Generation, the American successors of the British Romantic poets, who used their work to advance a sensuous examination of life.
My opinion of the group varies. I love William S. Burroughs and his Naked Lunch is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, but Kerouac’s On the Road is overrated and Ginsberg is a bore who enjoys shocking others above everything else.
This film comes close to capturing the uncertainty and rawness of the Beats before they were immortalized in college classrooms and became poster children for lazy pseudo-intellectualism.
The Last Seduction (1994)
Shady drug dealer Clay (Bill Pullman) scores enough money to pay off his loan shark, but, when he insults his wife Bridget (Linda Fiorentino), she steals the money and leaves.
On her way to Chicago, she meets Mike (Peter Berg) in a Buffalo suburb and seduces him. When her husband tracks her down, Bridget manipulates Mike into killing Clay and escapes with the money.
Fiorentino is a scary sociopath and Peter Berg is excellent as the naive Mike, but Bill Pullman is miscast as a hardened drug dealer.
This pale imitation of Body Heat (1981) and Double Indemnity (1944) errs by making Bridget a full-blown sociopath and forgoing the playfulness of the earlier films.
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
When scavenger Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) steals an orb from the planet Morag, Kree fanatic Ronan sends the assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana) to acquire the orb.
When she finds Quill on Xandar, they’re accosted by bounty hunters Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel).
After a brief skirmish, the group is arrested and thrown in jail where they meet Drax (Dave Bautista). He’s initially hostile, but when they promise him a chance to extract revenge on Ronan for killing his family, he helps them escape.
While negotiating to sell the orb to The Collector (Benicio del Toro), they discover it contains an Infinity Stone.
Ronan, with the help of Zamora’s sister Nebula (Karen Gillian), finds the group and uses the Infinity Stone to launch a war against the Nova Corp, leaving Quill and his rag-tag group of friends as the last line of defense.
Affable and charming, Chris Pratt is a less intimidating, less bulky version of The Rock.
Miraculously, Bradley Cooper manages to make an anthropomorphic raccoon the emotional center of the film, continuing his recent streak of successes.
Dave Bautista shows unexpected subtlety and demonstrates an impeccable sense of timing. There may not be many roles for a muscle-bound goofball, but if there are, he’s in the running for them.
It’s nice to see veteran actor Michael Rooker getting some much deserved attention as Yondu, and this film will go a long way to ensuring Karen Gillian is remembered as more than Amy Pond.
The first foray of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmic side of their catalog is a rousing success, and smartly positions itself as the spiritual lovechild of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, subtly reinforcing this with its vintage soundtrack.
This is not art house cinema, although it certainly touches on genuinely emotional material with Quill’s parents, Drax’s family, Rocket’s existential pain, and Groot’s sacrifice, but the movie backgrounds these emotional arcs for escapist fun. True to their comic roots, Marvel is much more interested in producing entertainment than art. As long as the product is as good as this, I hope they continue.
Silent Movie (1976)
Mel Funn (Mel Brooks) is a down on his luck film director with a big idea. He wants to resurrect the silent film genre, but the reluctant studio chief (Sid Caesar) only agrees to green-light the project if Funn can convince Hollywood’s biggest stars to appear in the film.
Unfortunately, the big conglomerate, Engulf and Devour is planning on taking over the studio and, worried a big hit will put it out of their price range, attempts to sabotage his film.
Not quiet as funny as Brooks’s earlier films, this is both a loving homage to the silent pictures of his youth and a biting satire of 1970s Hollywood, its obsession with stardom, and the domination of business over artistic decisions.
Ironically, because so much of the humor is based on topical in-jokes and relies on stars who were famous forty years ago (Burt Reynolds, Liza Minelli, Paul Newman, and Brooks’ wife Anne Bancroft), this movie is, in many ways, as dated to modern audiences as the silent movies it made fun of were in 1976.