What is growing up? This is the question Boyhood meditates upon. Aging is at its most dramatic during youth, those first 18 years we consider, because of how precipitous the changes are. Passed that point, everything can seem to become a blur. And what is fascinating to always consider, is during this tumultuous time, it […]

The Coen Brothers suffer, if at all, from an abundance of wit, leading to, as in the instance of Burn After Reading, a fast-thrown dialogue onto the screen ridiculing the modern day Rome on the Potomac. It’s put so poetically in the dark comedy by the protagonist Osbourne Cox: once the Cold War ended, the […]

In another witty yet seemingly more polished slice of the affluent side of New York life, where the life problems involve finishing nearly decade old documentaries and deciding on whether to join a family friend at their second home in Connecticut, Noah Baumbach delivers a further anthological piece to his meditation on, not mortality, but […]

The Little Death gives us a mildly fresh reprieve on the existential anxiety the Last Man faces. Here, miles above the surface of struggle on Earth, he has time to play with the variegations of sexual preferences; yes, normal sexual intercourse is no longer enough but itself must be enriched, to serve the purpose of […]

Shall the meek inherit the Earth? There is a very complicated relationship between Hollywood and the poor. Very rarely, however, do we see an examination of American poverty as-is, not so much celebrating as portraying its very character. And what is firstly in this regard? Desperation. This does not eschew reality. The waking characteristic of […]

Room is an inventive drama, exploring in a very professionally artistic fashion the horrors of something worse than slavery and entrapment, but something that can only be described as a living hell; of a young woman taken captive and forced to live in a shed for more than seven years with no contact with the […]

Duchamp to Pop attempts to link the emergence of the Pop Art phenomenon to Marcel Duchamp, the undoubtedly pioneering French artist who fed off of a shock and awe campaign of altering the definition of art, away from a purely aesthetic effort. We might consider Duchamp then the originator of artistic expression that is not […]

Can good, if not great, artistic technique be sufficient enough a measure for good art? Is such mastery of the most fastidious detail in visual representation not an astonishment in itself? This is the challenge prompted by the artist, Adam Caldwell, who is exhibiting works that are self-described as emulating Jacques-Louis David’s intentionally theatrical spacing […]

I have spoken before about the need for the mastery of technique to be controlled and directed in a righteous manner; that the artist should not be mired and contented with their mastery of a craft. It is simply a higher form of onanism, then, which does not reveal anything spiritually significant to the audience […]

While missing the first installment of this exposure to another perspective of the world, I was fortunate enough to find this one, albeit quaintly installed in a side corner of one of the Los Angeles County Museum’s building. There are two immediate invocations that are summoned when walking briskly through this. The first is the […]