‘Separation’ Anxiety: A Tense Iranian Drama Goes For The Gold

(Films discussed in this post: Trespass, Boy Wonder, A Separation, Passion Play, Tuesday After Christmas, The Trip, The Double, The Beaver.)

This is my 100th post in this blog, and coincidentally, this post also marks 100 reviews of 2011 films. As you’ll see, I’ve saved some of the most obscure for last.

Every year there are hundreds of films that fly off the radar. There are a number of different levels of visibility for a movie; some, you’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to miss hearing about, which covers most major studio releases. Then there are the indies that the majority of mainstream viewers won’t have heard about, but most film-savvy people will — we’re talking the Take Shelters, Martha Marcy May Marlenes, and Bellflowers of this world. There are a couple levels even below that, too — the ones only the really film-savvy will have seen or heard of, like The Arbor and Poetry. And then it keeps going, to films that were screened at festivals but not picked up for distribution, or shot and never released, until it’s a film that only you have heard of, because you made it up in your own mind.

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Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing: ‘Poetry’ & ‘Carnage’

Ah, bad kids. Where would the movies be without them?

From ghostly dead youngsters in The Ring and The Shining to the bloodthirsty (but still breathing) tykes of The Bad Seed and The Good Son, there’s a long-standing storytelling tradition in Hollywood to use sinister children as the Ultimate Evildoers — the juxtaposition between innocent faces and malicious intent gets us cinematically wet, I guess.

Recently (“ripped from the headlines” in Law & Order fashion), the movies have added a subgenre to this category with school shootings, like the current release We Need To Talk About Kevin. That’s not a horror movie, per se, but it does deal with a mother’s horrified reaction to the bad, bad thing her baby did.

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Hard In The City vs. The Golden Globes: Live Blog & Winners 2012

It’s the Golden Globes! And because I currently have nothing better to do, I am watching and blogging about them. (Nominees here, FYI.)

I’ll be doing some sort of live-blogging/recap as we go on, so… enjoy!

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Gold Rush: The Golden Globe Nominees 2012

Ah, The Golden Globes. What can I say about The Golden Globes that hasn’t been said before?

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