Tag: James Franco

Movie Review: THE DISASTER ARTIST – Franco’s best directorial effort yet makes this biopic of “the worst move ever made” a must-see.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie ReviewsLeave a comment

Back in 2010, I saw The Room.  By then it had started to gather a head of steam as “the worst movie ever made” (and there’s a compelling argument for that, not just hype), and the beginning of the cult following that fills theaters these days.  In those days it wan’t so much the event movie it is today, where everyone attends thinking they’re the next ironic comedy genius, riffing as the movie unreels.  I don’t normally watch movies like that (though when Star Wars:TOT was rereleased in the late 90s, a friend and I got ejected for riffing on The Empire Strikes Back.  Mea culpa, mea culpa …), I love and respect the medium too much to do that.  The Room is, to me, simply a piece of shit movie.

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Movie Review: TRUE STORY – a vaguely unsatisfying true crime story that’s more Dateline than In Cold Blood

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true_story

In 2002, Christian Longo was arrested in Mexico for the December 2001 murders of his wife and three children.  In the month or so he’d been hiding out there, he used the alias Michael Finkel.  Not uncommon for fugitives to do that, but in Longo’s case, the name was that of a specific person.  It wasn’t someone he knew – not a neighbor or a friend or a fictional character.  Michael Finkel was the name of a contributing editor at the New York Times who was fired by the paper around the same time as Longo’s arrest for writing a well-meaning, though fictional account of the African slave trade.  When Finkel learns of Longo, he is intrigued enough to contact Longo directly to ask why the accused murderer used his name, of all people.  True Story is the movie adaptation of Finkel’s resulting book that detailed their relationship.

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