Scott Holleran » Movies

Movie Review: The Great Gatsby (2013)

Scott Holleran — Mon, 13 May 2013 08:21:41 +0000

If you’ve ever had a feeling of anticipation prior to attending what you hope and have reason to believe will be a grand and exciting party, where the guest is immersed in celebration of something worth celebrating and eventually reaches an elevated sense of lightness, only to attend and be let down and disappointed, feeling [...]

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Movie Review: 42

Scott Holleran — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:25:41 +0000

Jackie Robinson is the subject of the poorly named 42, an overly sentimental movie about how to change a culture one man at a time that can’t help but be powerful and moving. Unlike other fact-based historical films centering upon an individual, such as Good Night, and Good Luck and Schindler’s List, there is fundamental [...]

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Movie Review: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Scott Holleran — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:15:17 +0000

Lacking the courage of its conviction to trump nihilism with idealism and never achieving anything close to incredible, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone performs in fits and starts. That’s too bad, because its theme that magic should evoke the feeling that “anything in the universe is possible” – as against the notion that one can never be [...]

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Movie Review: Admission

Scott Holleran — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 05:15:05 +0000

Marketing usually makes a movie look better, not worse, than it is. But not Admission. The film’s promotional campaign flips that rule and undercuts comedienne Tina Fey’s first major solo picture. Fey stars as an Ivy League admissions officer who is drawn by unorthodox teacher Paul Rudd to an alternative school student as a potential candidate for [...]

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Movie Review: If I Were You

Scott Holleran — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 09:12:28 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of seeing an independent dark comedy starring Marcia Gay Harden (The Hoax) called If I Were You. Harden’s is a marvelous performance in its range alone and, while it is not quite the breezy light comedy its tagline – “what happens when your new best friend is your husband’s mistress” [...]

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Movie Review: Oz the Great and Powerful

Scott Holleran — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:31:46 +0000

Disney’s reboot of the Oz story series created by writer L. Frank Baum at the turn of the last century, called Oz the Great and Powerful, is neither great nor powerful. It is, however, fully entertaining. Just don’t expect anything close to being one-tenth as fascinating as the original 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz [...]

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Movie and DVD Review: Schindler’s List

Scott Holleran — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:41:42 +0000

Most Holocaust-themed movies minimize the Nazi atrocities. Life is Beautiful trivializes government-sponsored death camps and promises everyone a moral pass with the theme that humor alleviates mass murder – Oliver Stone similarly tried to hustle an upside to Islamicist mass murder in World Trade Center – implying that no one should take life too seriously. Not even [...]

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Oscars Postscript

Scott Holleran — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:10:32 +0000

I had one more thought on last night’s smarmy Oscars. If anyone needed proof that momentarily escaping today’s rising fascism through absurdist humor – by Gutfeld, Colbert, Miller, South Park/Simpsons/Seinfeld, Stern, Stewart and Seth MacFarlane among other comedians – is impossible, last night’s show offered plenty of evidence. We saw that when the state busts [...]

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The 85th Annual Academy Awards

Scott Holleran — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:36:39 +0000

The Oscars turned 85 tonight. But they took a leap backward into the dark ages with the politicization of the motion picture arts and sciences when the Best Picture award (which went to Argo) was presented by the president’s wife – Michelle Obama, an envious, harsh critic like her husband of people who are productive [...]

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Movie Review: A Good Day to Die Hard

Scott Holleran — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 21:25:33 +0000

Cultural contrast is at the center of what amounts to “Die Hard 5″ – 20th Century Fox’s A Good Day to Die Hard – starring Bruce Willis as John McClane in Russia. There are the requisite plot twists of the series, which began in the 1980s with the perfectly done, Los Angeles-based Die Hard. Here, the [...]

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