Day: October 21, 2005

North Country

In an opening shot, little Karen Aimes (Elle Peterson), is playing with a Barbie doll as a car pulls up to the house. At first, we see her mother, Josey (Charlize Theron), looking out the window. Then, the shot cuts to Josey cleaning blood off her face. The film gets right to the point: Josey has been beaten by her husband, which, we’ll discover is neither the first nor the last time men will take…

Capote

Maybe it’s because I was fixed upon intensely hating Truman Capote, as he is depicted in this film, or perhaps because I had just seen the crisp, ratiocinative Edward R. Murrow as portrayed in “Good Night and Good Luck” the night prior. “Capote” doesn’t strike me as nearly as interesting a film, and Truman Capote doesn’t…

Stay

“Stay,” directed by Marc Forster, is a bizarre and almost maddening film—in a good way. The movie begins as a tire blows out on a vehicle. It begins hurtling end over end down the length of the Brooklyn Bridge. Just as you’re trying to sort out what happened, time moves forward to a shot of Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling) sitting on the ground near the burning vehicle as sirens can be heard approaching…

Doom

Video games have never been my forte, but that fact did not keep me from spending hour after hour playing Doom 2 on my girlfriend’s computer during my first Junior year of college. I was a terrible, terrible player – but my hand/eye coordination issues were supplemented by my brazenly unabashed use of “cheat codes” that were built into the game for players such as me. This approach worked fine for me because my object in playing…