Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact


by M. Faust

Run Fat, Boy, Run
“I’m not fat, I’m unfit,” complains rent-a-cop Dennis (Simon Pegg) to a transvestite shoplifter making him run laps around a London shop district.

21
If you couldn’t get into the Oceans Eleven movies because of all the old guys in the cast (“Brad Pitt? Yeah, maybe if I’m taking my mom!”), you are the target audience for 21, a movie that has as much impact on the screen as its title does on the page.

Stop-Loss
You can’t help but have noticed that there have been no small number of films about the war in the past year or two. They are all well intended and do their best to demonstrate either generally that war is an awfully thing or specifically that the current one in Iraq has been atrociously bungled from day one. But they are largely failures for the reason that no one tends to see them other than people who already believe what they have to say: Anyone who might stand to learn something from such films has no intention of seeing any of them. (Which explains why so few of them have done any business at the box office.) To this list you can add Stop-Loss, though it may get a bigger audience than others of its ilk because it works so hard to seem like it’s not what it is.

Married Life
The opening credits sequence can do so much to establish the tone of the film we are about to see, which may be why so many filmmakers no longer like to use them: I suppose they disdain having to provide a précis of work that plans to take its time leading us in different directions. The independent film Married Life has opening credits that do their best to evoke a certain time and mood.



Back to issue index