by Nathan Sacks

Even by the standards of the musical biopic, Straight Outta Compton commits remarkable acts of historical revisionism. This is a sanitized, Hallmark, cookie cutter version of reality that is inexplicably being described as “unvarnished” and “uncompromising” by movie critics. Please. The film has several coats of varnish and features loads of artistic and dramatic compromises so glaring that parts of the film are unintentionally funny. In fact, SOC isn’t so much a biopic as it is a superhero film that treats Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre (and only those three men) as epochal geniuses with only minor, overcomeable flaws.

by Nathan Sacks

[Note: The following is an attempt to write an Ant-Man review without using the words “Marvel,” “comic book,” “superhero,” or “corporate,” thereby avoiding lapsing into constant cliché.]

Ant-Man’s descriptor is a built in contradiction—the tiny blockbuster—that can either be seen as clever and refreshing or unbearably precious. Your mileage may vary, and it might depend on your appreciation for source material like Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man (1956) or the film Fantastic Voyage (1966) and its Isaac Asimov novelization. Honey I Shrunk the Kids aside, we haven’t seen many movies about people who shrink since the golden age of '50s sci-fi. Ant-Man demonstrates that this is an unheralded sci-fi niche that, with the right approach, modern audiences can come to appreciate.

by Nathan Sacks

by Nathan Sacks

by Nathan Sacks

by Nathan Sacks

by Nathan Sacks

Like Deep Impact and Armageddon, hot on the heels of the James Brown biopic Get on Up is Jimi: All is By My Side. Starring Andre Benjamin (better known to many as Andre 3000 of OutKast), All is By My Side vividly recreates the slang and fashions of 1966 London, while only rarely falling into the trap of rock nostalgia clichés and, in fact, ends up becoming a celebration of the purity and fearlessness of Hendrix’s approach to music.

by Nathan Sacks

Adaptation is a tricky thing. Even when the aspects of a book one so admires get translated faithfully to film, those same aspects can seem lacking. For instance, one of my favorite books is The Old Man and the Sea, which was the subject of a 1958 Spencer Tracy film deemed “the most literal, word-for-word rendition of a written story ever filmed.” Yet the film, perhaps because it is so faithful, still lacks the totalizing, punishing effect of the book. What does this prove? That the quality of a work of storytelling depends on more than just arc, sequence of events, dialogue. There is a secret alchemy involved, which is why some faithful versions of books score so high in the collective consciousness, while others are viewed as unnecessarily vestigial for the same reasons.

Directors: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez
Producers: Sergei Bespalov, Aaron Kaufman, Stephen L’Heureux, Marc C. Manuel, Alexander Rodnyansky, Robert Rodriguez
Writer: Frank Miller
Cinematographer: Robert Rodriguez
Editor: Robert Rodriguez
Music: Robert Rodriguez, Carl Thiel
Cast: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Powers Boothe

Runtime: 102m.
Genre: Action/Crime/Thriller
Country: USA
US Theatrical Release: August 22, 2014
US Distributor: The Weinstein Company

by Nathan Sacks

The latest franchise reboot, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, belongs to a new and interesting breed of films in our culture: films that audiences declare failures long in advance of their release. Recall the responses to John Carter and The Lone Ranger. In both cases, box office and critical response were assumed to be awful, and critics and prognosticators were almost gleeful in their collective savaging of these films. Of course, many thought these films weren’t really that bad, but those opinions were swiftly forgotten in favor of the damning Internet hive response. These movies seemed to be convenient scapegoats for so-called experts who are obsessed with box office and Tomatometer percentages (i.e. everything other than film qua film). I felt like the only critic at my screening who went into the movie with a positive outlook. The easiest and most obvious thing for a movie critic to do is complain about a movie when everyone else is ready, even eager to do the exact same thing.