Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
An inconvenient weekend at the movies
There’s not a lot of good stuff in this week’s new releases
Detroit: You’re looking at what is probably the best part of the film right here: Mr. John Boyega.
This was...not a great week for movies. The big drama? Well acted, badly built.
Movie
Detroit *
Remember the torture, er, <em>enhanced interrogation</em> scene in <em>Zero Dark Thirty</em>? The one that produced good intel that ultimately aided in the detection and subsequent elimination of Osama Bin Laden? Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are happy to repeat the theme here, as light-skinned folks once again abuse the dark-skinned folks in their power in an attempt to ferret out terrorists seeking to topple America. Only this time, the light-skinned folks are Detroit police, the dark-skinned folks are Detroit citizens, and the terrorists are snipers taking shots at the soldiers who have been called in to quell the race riot that erupted on that city’s streets in 1967. Oh, and one other thing: there’s no good intel to be had. Bigelow and Boal want to make a moral howl of a movie that burns with felt life, but they wind up with a failure of historical imagination that undermines a harrowing true story. Put another way: sometimes, no amount of good acting can overcome bad writing. (John Boyega is a standout in the former department as a security guard trying to maintain order without participating in the destruction of his fellow blacks, a thankless task that just keeps getting more thankless.) It’s bad enough that chief abuser Will Poulter is so cartoonishly evil that he becomes like the sun, obscuring all the other racist stars in the sky. But what’s worse is the sloppy job Boal does in assembling a narrative of the evening in question. (The examples are too numerous to list, but here are a couple: a cop can’t sell a “suspect went for my gun” story when said suspect has been shot in the back from a distance; a cop won’t say “we still need a suspect” when he’s already got one dead on the floor; and for goodness’ sake, why don’t the terrified innocents simply report what they saw?) The heart wants to throb in sympathy, but the head keeps being led to interfere.
The big adaptation? A fizzle by all accounts. (Your humble correspondents saw it coming and steered clear.)
The “starring Academy-Award winning actress Halle Berry” pic? Only slightly better.
The harrowing horror debut? Awful.
The foreign arthouse religious allegory? Also awful.
The Charlie Chaplin homage? Over-whimsified.
At least the Stanley Donen homage was okay.
Oh, and Al Gore is back with a planetary update. So there’s that.
Here's something you might be interested in.
An inconvenient weekend at the movies
There’s not a lot of good stuff in this week’s new releases
An inconvenient weekend at the movies
There’s not a lot of good stuff in this week’s new releases
Detroit: You’re looking at what is probably the best part of the film right here: Mr. John Boyega.
This was...not a great week for movies. The big drama? Well acted, badly built.
Movie
Detroit *
Remember the torture, er, <em>enhanced interrogation</em> scene in <em>Zero Dark Thirty</em>? The one that produced good intel that ultimately aided in the detection and subsequent elimination of Osama Bin Laden? Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are happy to repeat the theme here, as light-skinned folks once again abuse the dark-skinned folks in their power in an attempt to ferret out terrorists seeking to topple America. Only this time, the light-skinned folks are Detroit police, the dark-skinned folks are Detroit citizens, and the terrorists are snipers taking shots at the soldiers who have been called in to quell the race riot that erupted on that city’s streets in 1967. Oh, and one other thing: there’s no good intel to be had. Bigelow and Boal want to make a moral howl of a movie that burns with felt life, but they wind up with a failure of historical imagination that undermines a harrowing true story. Put another way: sometimes, no amount of good acting can overcome bad writing. (John Boyega is a standout in the former department as a security guard trying to maintain order without participating in the destruction of his fellow blacks, a thankless task that just keeps getting more thankless.) It’s bad enough that chief abuser Will Poulter is so cartoonishly evil that he becomes like the sun, obscuring all the other racist stars in the sky. But what’s worse is the sloppy job Boal does in assembling a narrative of the evening in question. (The examples are too numerous to list, but here are a couple: a cop can’t sell a “suspect went for my gun” story when said suspect has been shot in the back from a distance; a cop won’t say “we still need a suspect” when he’s already got one dead on the floor; and for goodness’ sake, why don’t the terrified innocents simply report what they saw?) The heart wants to throb in sympathy, but the head keeps being led to interfere.
The big adaptation? A fizzle by all accounts. (Your humble correspondents saw it coming and steered clear.)
The “starring Academy-Award winning actress Halle Berry” pic? Only slightly better.
The harrowing horror debut? Awful.
The foreign arthouse religious allegory? Also awful.
The Charlie Chaplin homage? Over-whimsified.
At least the Stanley Donen homage was okay.
Oh, and Al Gore is back with a planetary update. So there’s that.
Commentszkar
This comment was removed by the site staff for violation of the usage agreement.
Dec. 3, 2018
Sample
This comment was removed by the site staff for violation of the usage agreement.
Dec. 19, 2018
Hardwork23
This comment was removed by the site staff for violation of the usage agreement.
Jan. 11, 2019