Movie Review: The Trotsky

Seventeen year-old Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel) thinks he’s the reincarnation of Bolshevic revolutionary Leon Trotsky. He has meticulously studied the life of his hero, and he intends to replicate it in every way possible, from marrying a girl ten years his senior, to leading his fellow citizens in revolt against the forces of oppression. When his father (Saul Rubinek), the owner of a small factory, gives him a job, Leon organizes his father’s workers into a strike. Leon’s father gamely punishes his son by pulling him out of the private prep school he’s attending and placing him in a public school. Because, after all, the real Trotsky attended a public high school too. Read the rest of this entry »

Tron: Legacy

The original Tron (1982) was not a great movie. But it articulated some ideas that were big at the time, and thus came to be widely remembered as better than it actually was. The central conceit – that a man can be transported inside of a computer, and interact with programs as if they were people – was a ready-made fantasy for a generation of children who came to believe that global technological advances were directly tied to their own journey into adulthood.

The original Tron was the story of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a professional programmer, hacker, championship video gamer, video game arcade owner, lady’s man and general wise-ass. In short, he was exactly the type of adult that every geekboy wanted to grow up to be. Flynn lived in an apartment above his arcade, with windows around the perimeter, through which he could look down on the gamers. It was the sort of thing that makes sense to those who have many years to speculate about what their own future dwelling-place is going to be like. Read the rest of this entry »

Movie Review: The Little Fugitive (1953)

I might have easily stumbled across this movie while flipping channels late at night, in which case I wouldn’t have lasted through the first five minutes. And that would have been a shame.

At the beginning, Joey, who is about six, watches his older brother and his brother’s friends play games he’s left out of. The level of treacly gee-whizishnes is hard to take, and we’re acutely conscious of being inside a completely constructed world.

The older kids are annoyed that Joey’s brother Kennie can’t join an upcoming trip to Coney Island because he has to look after Joey. In order to get Joey to go away, they convince him that he has accidentally shot Kennie in the chest. Joey flees to Coney Island, where most of the story takes place. Read the rest of this entry »

Movie Review: Iron Man 2

It was often said of the first Iron Man movie that it was “surprisingly good.”

It was good, because the characters were well-drawn, the audience’s intelligence was not insulted, and the dialog was terse and well-constructed. The action was terse too. Stuff exploded, people died, but one had the feeling that those things were happening exactly as much as was necessary. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark was smarmy and obnoxious, but that was okay, because it was a set-up for him to get his world turned upside-down. Trapped in a cave with a failing heart, without access to his money or resources, Stark was forced to re-evaluate his life, and we like him better at the end of the movie than we did at the beginning.

In Iron Man 2, it’s basically like none of that ever happened, except the part where he turns his own artificial heart into a suit of armor that is also a jet plane. Read the rest of this entry »

Movie Review: Exit Through The Gift Shop

Exit Through The Gift Shop is so self-aware, so tightly built out of and around the mechanisms of art and film and pretension, that it’s almost impossible to describe it without making yourself sound like one of the characters within it, and that applies equally to this next sentence, true though it is: This movie is an instant classic, a shoe-in for Best Documentary 2010 Oscar, a documentary about documentaries, a work of art that encapsulates and explains works of non-art, an apologia and a manifesto rolled into one.

I saw it without having any preconception of what it was about, and despite this review, I encourage you to do the same. In film school, screenwriters are taught to make their endings surprising yet inevitable, and Exit Through The Gift Shop has such an ending, all the more disturbing and hilarious because it takes place in real life.
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