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FILM REVIEWS
STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING — It's not so often that you get a movie about literary people that's not dumbed down to appease the movie marketplace, whether commercial or arthouse. That's why director Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening, an adaptation of Brian Morton's novel, is such cause to rejoice -- a movie about a writer, and, better yet, unafraid to depict the writer's life exactingly and sensitively. Read it here...
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY — Never mind how you feel about Julian Schnabel the flamboyant bon vivant, as a filmmaker he's one of the most inventive and captivating artists around. Each of his images is full of fire and feeling, as if the human heart had found its visual equivalent, and Schnabel's third feature The Diving Bell and the Butterfly finds the artist in brilliant form. Read it here...
JUNO — Probably the quirkiest coming-of-age comedy to come along in recent memory, Jason Reitman's follow-up to his savagely entertaining Thank You For Smoking (2005) tackles teen pregnancy -- a subject heretofore relegated to weepie melodramas, after-school specials, and health science tutorials. But Juno is something unlike any of those august aforementioned genres, proving itself to be many things at once and a stellar success at each. Read it here...
CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR—Director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin made two exceedingly smart choices in adapting George Crile's book Charlie Wilson's War. First, they consented to a brisk 95-minute running time, rather than fall prey to the "prestige" mentality that can saddle such projects, and that bloats them out to beyond two hours. The other choice was leavening their material with a snappy, devil-may-care attitude -- a sure-fire strategy to skim over their story's weakest areas of story and character development. Read it here...
*** THE BEST FILM OF 2007 *** NANKING—A masterful fusion of stylistic artifice, archival footage and authentic interviews, Nanking vividly re-creates a much ignored and ignominious episode of 20th-century history. Inspired by Iris Chang's book The Rape of Nanking, filmmakers Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman set about chronicling the atrocities that transpired in the eponymous Chinese city in late 1937, when Japanese forces, which had been involved in an aggressive empire-building campaign on the Asian mainland since 1931, began a brutal siege of what was then China's capital.
THE MYSTERIANS JUST ADDED! Finally! Get the low-down on this slam-bang sci-fi/fantasy comic book slated for an early 2008 street date. Be sure to follow the link to my online interview on TheStream.tv, and feast your eyes on the artwork as Book One of this 3-book series nears completion. But, always, always, beware the Gamma Hydrans. They are everywhere.
ARTICLES & ESSAYS by Jay Antani by Maria R. Burgio
FICTION & POETRY
FICTION: The Building Manager's Lament JUST ADDED! by Greg Rock Losses JUST ADDED! by Robert Israel by Andy Bailey by John Fox by K.M. Breay POEMS: Twilight, Like an American, and But Where Would by Shanee Michaelson Before I Forget, Awake to America, and Summer/Fairgrounds by Jay Antani
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