Sorted by date Results 1 - 10 of 10
The Shack Starring Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, Graham Greene, Avraham Aviv Alush, Sumire Matsubara In The Shack, Sam Worthington plays a guy named Mack, who, after a family tragedy, is angry at God while also not sure if God exists. I think plenty of people can identify with that feeling. When things happen to us that are hard to bear or don't make sense, our first reaction is to blame God. And God rarely comes to His own defense. But this time God does show up. Mack...
La La Land Hidden Figures La La Land "La La Land" seems to barely exist as a movie. It is so light and breezy, so stocked with nostalgia and whimsy, dream sequences, and references to other movies; it feels like it might be that one movie everyone thinks they saw that never actually existed. Was that even real, or did I dream it? If it was real, it starred Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, two young hopefuls in the city of lights, waiting for their big break. Stone wants to be an...
Drunktown's Finest Deepwater Horizon "Drunktown's Finest" is set in the fictional town of Dry Lake, New Mexico, which is pretty clearly a stand-in for Gallup, New Mexico. If you're familiar with Gallup, there'll be plenty of local landmarks you'll recognize. I saw a motel I stayed in once. Gallup/Dry Lake is right on the edge of the Navajo reservation and the movie is about three different Navajos who go back and forth between dominant culture in the city and Navajo culture...
Kubo and the Two Strings "If you must blink,..." "If you must blink, do it now." That's the first line of "Kubo and the Two Strings, spoken over a dark screen, and it's good advice, because what follows is a visual feast that you won't want to take your eyes off for even a second. Director Travis Knight and the LAIKA animation team have seamlessly blended stop motion and digital animation to create a movie that doesn't look like any other. Young Kubo is a storyteller with the...
The cinematic offerings that highlight Native American or Indigenous issues or feature promising Native American or Indigenous actors have been pretty thin lately, but I thought I'd take this issue of Indian Life to let you know about two films I've seen recently that fall into those categories. The Activist is a film set on (or near) the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation during the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973. Cyril Moran, a Frenchman, directs it and the film has...
As anybody who knows anything already knows, 42 is the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. It also happens to be the number Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play Major League baseball, wore on his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform. Coincidence? I think not. I imagine everyone knows a little bit about Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947. His number is the only one retired by every team in baseball, and on...
Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln is deceptively titled; this isn’t a biopic in the traditional sense of the form. A better title would be “The 13th Amendment,” but it’s pretty easy to see why Spielberg and company didn’t go with that. Lincoln plays like a 19th century version of The West Wing. It focuses on a few weeks in Lincoln’s White House, and the struggles, contriving, deal making, scheming, and pleading it took to get an abolishment of slavery into the Constitution....
If you read this column regularly, you know that I am not a fan of comparing books to movies. They are two very different mediums with different strengths that aren’t going to translate from one to the other. I read The Hobbit probably 20 years ago, so my memory of it is pretty fuzzy. This seemed to be like an ideal way to go see the movie—I still remember what happens, mostly, but I wouldn’t spend the whole movie thinking, “This isn’t how it happens in the book! Oh no! They...
If you’ve been following the story of the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team (and if you haven’t, you really should start) you know it’s the kind of thing that would make a great sports movie. Sadly, Crooked Arrows isn’t that movie. True, it’s about the triumph of an underdog Native American lacrosse team, but the parallels end there. The Arrows are a high school team, not the Nationals. And more importantly, Crooked Arrows is a long ways from a great sports movie. The film...
In an odd aligning of the cinematic planets, two quite good movies set amongst the Inupiats of Barrow, Alaska have become available on DVD within the last few weeks. Barrow is the northernmost city in the United States, and previously was the setting of the bloody awful vampire movie 30 Days of Night. Both of these movies are much better than that one. The shiny big one with the hollow insides is Big Miracle. Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski lead a cast full of recognizable...
