STARFISH * * * 1 / 2
Starring Virginia Gardner, Christina Masterson, Eric Beecroft, Natalie Mitchell, Shannon Hollander. Written and directed by A.T. White.
Author Archives: Sean Burns
GLORIA BELL
“In today’s Hollywood, women of a certain age too often find themselves making dirty grandma jokes in sitcom-y garbage like last year’s Book Club. Director Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria Bell is a blessedly more dignified affair, genuinely interested in growing older gracefully and attuned to an everyday loneliness that for a lot of folks is just a fact of life.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/14/2019
MAPPLETHORPE
“Shot in 19 days on a minuscule budget, it’s a threadbare-looking movie short on extras and exteriors with stock footage standing in for most of the establishing shots. But this paucity of resources wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t also extend to the vision behind the project. Timoner brings no palpable passion nor any particular point of view.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/07/2019
CAPTAIN MARVEL
“A drab-looking chase picture awash in tedious exposition and overbearing period pop culture references. The movie appears to visually constrict as it goes along, beginning in the vast reaches of outer space and moving through progressively smaller and less spectacular settings until finally everyone’s having a fist-fight in a rec room full of junk.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/06/2019
A MADEA FAMILY FUNERAL
“I find Perry’s films fascinating in how violently they whiplash from juvenile tastelessness to churchy sermonizing and back again. The lowest of lowbrow comedy is interrupted by exhortations to get right with Jesus. Meanwhile, all of this is staged with such little regard for basic principles of filmmaking that certain scenes approach the realm of outsider art.” – North Shore Movies, 03/02/2019
THE IMAGE BOOK
“An 84-minute collage with the sensory impact of an audio-visual apocalypse, The Image Book is a discursive and disjointed procession of lightning-quick clips and fractured scene fragments snatched out of everything from classic Hollywood movies to ISIS recruitment videos, stitched back-to-back and upside down in a swirling stream of consciousness.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/01/2019
THE SOUR HOUR: FINAL EPISODE
Honored to have been invited by my dear friend Craig D. Lindsey to be the final guest on KPFT’s The Sour Hour. He calls me up about halfway through and we bitch about the Oscars, the insufferable behavior of comic book movie fans, hemorrhoid medication and trying to sneak into Harlem Nights when we were kids. I’m really gonna miss this show. – The Sour Hour, 02/27/2019
GRETA
“Greta is a feast to look at and pretty much a riot to watch, infusing its generic stalker plot with all sorts of wild and wooly weirdness, fashioning it into a high-camp showcase for international art-house treasure Isabelle Huppert. It’s Neil Jordan’s most gonzo fairy tale since his unfairly derided In Dreams, and in Huppert he’s found his ideal Big Bad Wolf.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/27/2019
ABOUT THAT BEST PICTURE…
“Green Book would have looked clueless and dated in 1986. How many more films about the heroic kindness and bravery of white folks during the Civil Rights Era do we need before fragile viewers will finally feel reassured that ‘they would have been one of the good ones back then’ so Hollywood can move on and try to tell a different story for a change?” – Boston.com, 02/25/2019
OSCAR TAKEAWAYS 2019
“In the absence of scripted banter and special presentations, the Oscars’ most memorable moments this year were more off the cuff, as when Samuel L. Jackson took a break from presenting to update his pal Spike Lee on the score of Sunday night’s Knicks game. That big, boisterous hug between those two is probably gonna be the new lock screen on my phone.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/24/2019
SPLICED PERSONALITY 