The Lyric Theatre Blog

After 35 years of good, bad and ugly reviews and lots of commentary, At The Movies is no longer.  I have watched the various reviewers, Siskel and Ebert the best and brightest, off and on though these years.  I wneet a period of many years without watching any movies at all.  I let my life revolve around playing music and then raising a family and working way too hard.  In early 2002 I started volunteering at the Lyric, eventually becoming an employee as well as volunteer.  That meant seeing a movies on a weekly basis.  I would get up early Sunday morning and see what the “experts” thought of the latest flicks and indie films. The Lyric would actually show many of the “smaller” movies - movies in limited release, documentaries, etc., and it was interesting how the movies might move me in a different direction than the reviewers.  A valuable lesson learned.

Movies are an intensely personal experience and what I learned from At The Movies was that there are no experts, just some people more technically knowledgeable than others, some who had a more vast viewing experience and history. But what I learned was that each viewer takes a part of each movie to their heart and sees it through their own special world view.  There were no right or wrong reviews on At The Movies - the battling reviewers proved week after week that you bring as much to a movie as the movie brings to you.

Good by At The Movies.  I shall miss you but thank you for teaching me how to appreciate the art form of film.

What a bizarre …. film?…montage? ……  con?  Take a strong dose of Dadaism, throw in street art/graffiti, mix in a large helping of PT Barnum and you get Exit Through the Gift Shop.  Dada art goes Walmart?  Thierry Guetta is either an artistic genius, a business genius, a con man  or a total nut case.  No matter what you think, he is an interesting character.  If this were a fictional film, I would say the director went a tad overboard in portraying him but this is real … or is it?

The audience had a lot of fun with this film of a film maker(?) who becomes what he films, almost as if he fell down a rabbit hole and took over the Mad Hatter’s job.   Guetta makes films, lots of them, he just never makes a movie with the film he shoots.  And when he does, it explodes into riotous color with thousands of snippets unrelated to one another.  Then, sort of like a Renaissance master, he employs minions to create works of art that he envisions and takes the credit for since it is his direction that brings them into reality.  With hardly a glance he throws multi thousands of dollar price tags on them and the art world pays for the privilage of owning …. what?  Guetta is a man who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

I think I enjoyed this … movie?  The colorful cast who start out thinking Guetta a genius and end up questioning whether he has devalued THEIR art or brought a difference of meaning to it provide a sanity to his craziness.  As they become mainstream and leave the streets, is it they who have sold out or have they been duped by their chronicler?  See it - and then exit through the gift shop and out the rabbit hole.

I found Solitary Man to be a despicably good movie.  Douglas plays the business tycoon/self made man to perfection and when we see the character as he really is - damaged goods - it is almost gratifying.  We learn through the story that he was once a good man who started to cut corners which eventually leads to his downfall.  A true salesman who makes acquaintances easily, he betrays everyone who trusts him.  He finally is reduced to working in Danny Davito’s deli at his old college - a college that has a library named after him because he donated the money when he was a rich alumnus.  Davito gives the best line in the movie when asked how he can work around all the young coeds.  He used to want to play, but then he noticed that after the young ladies graduated they would come back for football games and be a little heavier, then get a little more wrinkled and he had that at home so why change.  The plot takes a twist when the mob gets involved and then the story fell apart for me.  I will not spoil it for those who want to see it  but I found the ending unsatisfyingly annoying.

Other than the ending, I found the movie had good dramatic moments and good humorous ones as well.  Douglas plays a 60 year old man and I could identify with some of what he was going through.  He handles his travails in a manner I wouldn’t choose but he carries it off convincingly.  I say see it and judge the ending for yourself.

Please Give this movie a chance!  First, this is NOT a documentary.  It is a movie about honesty: being honest with others, being honest with yourself, and being honest about being honest.  It is also a movie in how you view yourself versus how others see you.  Complex, yet with a lot of heart, it it gives good character studies of superficial people.  You can read the synopsis on the Lyric website, but what the synopsis doesn’t tell you is how beauty is only skin deep yet even that can be hurt by skin peels and tanning beds.

I tried to dislike several of the characters but by the next scene I was back in their corner.  One person tries to save the world because she is screwing the estates of the dead.  Another is screwing the elder granddaughter who is stalking the new love of her ex-boyfriend.  The scene with the bagged dog refuse made me think of walking around the duckpond with my dog. I found this movie to be very appealing but it is not reaching a wide audience.  Come on, people - you are missing a very good movie!

Saturday at 3 pm be sure to see Treasure of the Sierra Madre FREE!  Bur Wednesday and Thursday?  Please give Please Give a chance!

This movie was way too frenetic for my taste, but for fans of the punk genre, see it.  It is shot in MTV color and style - lots of film cuts and snippets that younger viewers - 20s and 30s - will feel more comfortable with.  I felt the storyline suffered a lack of cohesiveness but if you are a punk fan, go for it!

City Island is a quirky, funny movie.  It reminded me of The Importance of Being Earnest on steroids with a touch of Waiting for Guffman.  The cast is entirely two dimensional, but that is okay, for this movie looks at relationships in two dimensions: the real and the masks people wear to hide the real.  At first, the family seems like the stereotypical Italian/New Yorker loud family who shout rather than talk and believe the worst because “what we have here is a failure to communicate.”  It takes the unsuspecting son, found in the prison where Rizzo works, to expose the nasty little secrets that, if left unexposed, could destroy the family.

This is a very enjoyable movie that extols the virtue of communication.  Highly recommended!

This is one AWESOME freakin’ movie!  I give it two thumbs and two big toes up!  Take an old, worn out story about a loser who finds a lost dog that is injured and needs some fixing up and then breathe some dragon fire into it and what do you get?  A mixture of the early Star Wars, Up, Bolt, and who knows what else.  The animation is phenomenal and even in 2D the action leaps off the screen. The audience tonight was every age from 2 to 72 and I think everyone held their breath during the flights and laughed at the cheesy but well done jokes.  See it!

Based on the reaction of the audience tonight, this is going to be an unpopular review of what I think is an important movie.

I viewed this movie on two levels.  First, there is the content.  I saw a lot of the polarization of the political left and right in what happened to the Barnes collection of art after Barnes died. The collection is worth in the billions of dollars and the Barnes will was very specific in what was to be done with it.  Money, greed, politics and personalities all come together in trying to change the will and challenge the way the collection is managed.  Barnes wanted the collection to remain a teaching collection not to be split up, moved, put on public display or loaned to other institutions. He wanted it to be open to the plumbers of New York but not the societal mavens.  In the years following  his death, many forces tried and succeeded  in opening the collection to the world, including the societal mavens and the New York plumbers.  I found it humorous that the charitable trusts that support NPR and the NAACP also supported opening the collection and violating the Barnes will.  Choose your side and come out debating, there are valid points on both side, although the movie did direct you in one way.

This brings me to level two: the art of the documentary film.  OMG - this is a course in documentary film making.  Having watched many documentaries at the Lyric, the bias is often a sharp stick in your eye.  While I like the basic premises of Michael Moore’s work, it is hit you over the head until you bleed documentary film making. Other documentaries the Lyric has shown have been clear in their biases as well.  The Art of the Steal gives a clear picture of both sides and while it points you to where it thinks you ought to go, it provides fuel for an alternative position without questioning your intelligence.

I highly recommend The Art of the Steal on both levels.  If you like film making, if you like art, or if you like lift versus right political battles with lots of scandal, see The Art of the Steal now while you can in Blacksburg.  When you read the review in the Roanoke Times you’ll wish you had!

Taking this movie at face value and forgetting any bias about Roman Polanski, I found Ghost Writer to be a classic ’70s spy thriller in the John LeCarre mode.  The acting, cinematography, and just the general tone of this movie made me think of the delicious incongruency of English spy novels of that period with new gadgets, such as GPS and cell phones added in in a good way.  Ewan McGregor is the perfect foil as the ghost writer for the memoirs of a British ex-Prime Minister (Tony Blair?) several years after the war in Iraq.  There was a time warp that had to be overcome, as the movie seemed to be after Bush but a Condi Rice loo alike was still Secretary of State (or she might have been the VP).  What I found fascinating was how predictable parts were and then a page would turn and  there were more surprises.  In fact, throughout the film I had the ending figured out at least four times and … well … I should have seen it coming but I didn’t.  I think it would appeal to people over say, 40 years old more so than younger twenty or thirty somethings because the action, dialog and quirks are from a different era even though the gadgets are up to date.  But I’ve been wrong before, so see it and judge for yourself.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Roman Polanski is of questionable character and this may cause some to pass this film by.  It may be similar to not getting a certain football player’s autograph this weekend because of his criminal past.