There will be puns, there will be awards, there will be awesome. Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson (whose movies I often failed to appreciate in the past) has made a magnificent epic about the price of the precious resources, liquid and otherwise, that we extract from the ground — and from other [...]
Posts Tagged ‘california’
The Long Goodbye
“That’s a lot of entertainment for five grand!” Philip Marlowe’s talking about the questionable spectacle of a bunch of gangsters (including an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger) stripping to make a point, but it applies equally to Robert Altman’s time-traveling Chandler adaptation as a whole. Mumbling Elliott Gould is miles apart from Humphrey Bogart but drop dead [...]
Colma: The Musical
The first surprise is that Colma: The Musical plays it straight. You might imagine a musical about teenagers in a suburb south of San Francisco in which the majority of the population is dead to be an ironic tongue-in-cheek affair, using bursting-into-song conventions to poke fun at metastasizing franchise culture — Mallrats with a groove. [...]
Entourage
Breezy fun. For anybody with a passing interest in the lives of celebrities, the workings of the entertainment machine, and the conspicuous consumption of women, cars, and multimillion dollar houses formerly owned by Marlon Brando, this show is pure catnip. Over three short seasons, Vince and the boys have slowly revealed a little too much [...]
