Jan 26
The talents of Tupac Shakur are on full display in Juice, a 1992 crime drama directed by Ernest R. Dickerson. The film is a gritty and energetic one, brimming with violence and a focus on the transformative power of the streets. It explores the nature of violence and the reality of living in an environment in which violence is inevitable.
It’s taken me a little while to get going with film reviewing this year for some reason. I don’t really have an explanation for it, but I’m hoping to pick up the pace and hit the gas for more writing in the near future. In that regard, I decided to finally check out The Fast and the Furious. I’ve seen bits and pieces of other films in the series on cable and so on, but I’ve never actually seen the 2001 flick that started it all.
The genius of Margin Call is in keeping its perspective well within the bubble of Wall Street. More than a picture about financial collapse, this J. C. Chandor film is about mass delusion and morality. The notion of a public good does not occur in the minds of most of the characters and even the lesser evils are presented as either naïve or insistently greedy.
Written and directed by Nick Tomnay, The Perfect Host is the sort of film that starts out with so much promise but winds up a confusing, muddled, pointless crapfest. Made on a shoestring budget, this 2010 picture premiered at Sundance and wound up winning the audience award at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival in 2011. For the life of me, I can’t see why.
Directed by Fred Cavayé, Point Blank is a taut and well-made French thriller that has many of the standard genre conventions. The main selling feature here is a series of heart-stopping chase sequences that rival some of the best scenes in the Bourne trilogy. The whole everyman thrown into an extraordinarily dangerous situation notion has been done to death, but Cavayé’s picture has enough pop and sizzle to make it worthwhile.
