Drama

Review – Rushmore (1998)

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by Armando Vanegas

With Bottle Rocket being a critical hit, it only made sense for another studio like Touchstone Pictures to come calling and give Wes Anderson the skills to become the filmmaker that he is today. Due to its larger budget and higher profile, it’s no doubt that Rushmore is truly a Wes Anderson movie. I remember it being the movie that introduced me to Wes Anderson. Because of his unique style, no movie was like it at the time to me. Not to mention that it stood out from many other high school movies of its time such as Can’t Hardly Wait or American Pie. He knows how to use his style to create an immersive world that’s so meticulously detailed that he’s able to flesh out the characters and the story in a more convenient and subtle way than other filmmakers would probably do. Watching it now was somewhat unexpected. While I don’t think I can tout it as the masterpiece I once did, it was still an entertaining movie.

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Review – Patriot Season 1 & 2

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by Armando Vanegas

Amazon has a streaming service called Prime Video or Amazon Prime Video or Amazon Prime or whatever they’re calling it now. I don’t know if you know that. How else would you know that? Unless you read your monthly bank statement that says they took money from you if you ever bought a subscription to them. On the one hand, Amazon is wonderful for purchasing products of all kinds. On the other, they really gotta do some work in promoting their streaming service because it has some great content. It was just blind luck that I came across Patriot, a brilliantly surreal and hilarious spy comedy from Steven Conrad, the writer of the Will Smith drama The Pursuit of Happyness (probably the furthest removed from his style), the similarly surreal Nicolas Cage dramedy The Weather Man, and the just as surreal John C. Reilly/Seann William Scott buddy dramedy, The Promotion. Even though I liked those aforementioned movies, I didn’t know what to expect as the trailer didn’t exactly grab me. Neither did the trailers for their other shows. I just wanted to try some Amazon programming and this was the one that seemed relatively interesting to me. What the show accomplishes by the end should make it a must see for people wanting something weirder and more out there in their TV choices.

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AMC to Unveil Premiere Episodes of NOS4A2 and Into the Badlands at C2E2 on 3/23!

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On Saturday, March 23rd at C2E2, there will be a panel and premiere screening of AMC’s groundbreaking martial arts drama Into the Badlands, and special screening of the premiere episode of the network’s highly-anticipated new supernatural horror series NOS4A2 starring Zachary Quinto.

Into the Badlands Panel & premiere screening: 11:45 am to 1:15 pm in Room S404

NOS4A2 Screening: 4:30pm to 5:30pm at the Main Stage

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Official Trailer Premiere – THE PUBLIC – In Theaters April 5th

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In “The Public” an unusually bitter Arctic blast has made its way to downtown Cincinnati and the front doors of the public library where the action of the film takes place. At odds with library officials over how to handle the extreme weather event, some homeless patrons turn the building into a shelter for the night by staging an “Occupy” sit in. What begins as an act of civil disobedience becomes a stand-off with police and a rush-to-judgment media constantly speculating about what’s really happening. This David versus Goliath story tackles some of our nation’s most challenging issues, homelessness and mental illness and sets the drama inside one of the last bastions of democracy-in-action: your public library.

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Review – Bottle Rocket (1996)

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by Armando Vanegas

Sometimes, I get bored reviewing new movies so for some reason, I wanted to go through all the Wes Anderson movies in chronological order in the meantime. It’s just something that gives me a challenge to do and maybe there will be unexpected feelings and unique thoughts I never saw coming. So, without further delay, let’s begin with his 1996 debut, Bottle Rocket. I remember this being a movie that got a lot of play on Comedy Central back in the day and it was always the kind of movie that I never felt compelled to watch when it’s on. Honestly, I was never impressed with the bits I’d seen, but there were always interesting sequences that made the rest of the movie worth it. So, in subsequent years, I would watch bits and pieces because there was sometimes nothing to watch on cable. When I last watched this movie, I rated this movie rather highly back when I was more of a snob when it came to movies. But as anyone who has read my Phantom Thread review, I’ve decided to just to watch movies as their own individual self, judge them as their own thing no matter who’s involved in terms of the directors, the writers, or the actors. Watching this again was interesting. As a movie directed by someone who would be later become one of the most idiosyncratic and quirky filmmakers of our time, younger middle school me who watched this on cable was right. Outside of a few well directed sequences, it’s fine.

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Review – High Flying Bird (2019)

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by Armando Vanegas

Director Steven Soderbergh is nothing if not unconventional or unique. I may not always be crazy about the final product he might provide, but he’s at least playful with the medium. With High Flying Bird, he continues the trend of making unconventional choices by filming his second movie on an iPhone. It’s not an ideal choice, but I was willing to see what he was going to do with it. This unusual decision ends up working out in the end as it effectively fits with the narrative of the protagonist’s DIY plan to bring the game of basketball back to its players. High Flying Bird may not fully coalesce from a narrative standpoint, but the actors and the snappy screenplay by Moonlight writer Tarell Alvin McCraney help to make it a breezy watch.

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