Sometimes a horse comes out of the gate strong and dominates the track for the first few laps but then, suddenly and tragically, a leg goes – just buckles and snaps – and the horse is down, the rider is thrown, and their race is over. This same thing happens to Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and … Continue reading
I want to apologize for my long absence. It was not out of laziness or a lack of things to write about. To make a long story short, you’ll understand if you know anyone that has suffered from pressure sores and if you research them, you’ll understand how bad they are. I have been bed-ridden … Continue reading
TVT Records WebsiteBuy Lumidee at AmazonBuy Ying Yang Twins at AmazonThere’s a certain reason why I’m schlepping out reviews here at CHUD and not Billboard.com, Vibe, or some other music site. Well, actually there’s two: one is that Dave Davis wasn’t working for any of those guys, and two is that I can go on … Continue reading
Smell is, unless you’re John Waters and in possession of a few hundred Odorama cards, the toughest thing to get across in cinema. Most films rely on Pavolovian reactions to visuals to indicate the ideas of smells, but rarely try to actually get odor across. Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer, in his adaptation of … Continue reading
Babel is what Crash could have been if Paul Haggis were a better director. Alejandro González Iñárritu and longtime partner Guillermo Arriaga once again bring a fractured narrative to an otherwise straightforward story that contains supposedly deep commentary about the human condition. This is probably the last time they’ll be doing this, since Arriaga and … Continue reading
Children of Men is about a miracle. Children of Men is, itself, a miracle. It’s a movie that can single-handedly remove the scales of cynicism from your eyes, reminding you of what wonders cinema is capable. It’s a movie that rejects the two modern directions of the screen – a shrinking to TV size for … Continue reading
Jesus Christ, Rocky Balboa WORKS. Not always, and certainly not consistently, but more often than not Rocky Balboa is a movie that grabs and exhilarates the audience – and that’s despite huge problems like a bizarre structure, rampantly flat acting and sloppy editing. This film just shouldn’t be this enjoyable, and that’s part of its … Continue reading
I walked out of Letters From Iwo Jima thinking that we could have saved a lot of American lives in the Pacific Theater of WWII if we had just let the Japanese alone for a bit to kill themselves. Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to the dud-ish Flags of Our Fathers is soaked in suicide, with … Continue reading
BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!PUBLISHER: Da Capo PressMSRP: $15.95PAGES: 412 This reprinting of Huey P. Long’s 1933 autobiography comes well-timed into the modern political forum. Long was a political of unusual celebrity for his time, and his understanding of democracy as a theory was tentative at best, downright naïve at worst. His tendency to … Continue reading
We Are Marshall is the most insidious kind of bad movie – the very well made kind. It’s an easy, often beautiful, movie to watch, and if you’re not inoculated against the most base brand of movie cheese, it’s an easy movie to weep over. But it’s still bad, bad at it’s very core, because … Continue reading