The most startling thing about the emergence of 12 Years a Slave is its undeniable dominant casting performance. In particular, the flawless drama created by its black actors. In an almost humiliating manner, these actors flawlessly displayed the blemishes of Hollywood and Tinsel Town’s incapability to cast black talent. Sweepingly, this drama proved the […]

Fantastic Planet explores the idea of human beings being pests in a surreal world. Almost miniaturized to being classified as Earth-bound termites, humans are labeled as “Oms” by the giant blue anthropomorphic creatures, who treat them as pets and play things. The entire film is actually less surreal than anticipated, as it follows a linear […]

  Consider this the apex of Woody Allen’s philosophical meditation on being. And due to Hannah and her Sister’s mid-80’s completion, this might have been the turning point for the filmmaker, as this crescendo has clearly not been matched in any of his later works. It is the stark confrontation of the absurd by an […]

We all make mistakes. That is a dictum of life. It’s surprising how ignored it is and how discouraged one is to fail in the world. Then again current with this theme of artificial organizing is that the soul is now completely detached from the world it swims in.   The title Greenberg centers around […]

  What’s the deal with human life? Why does it matter? Why does it matter to the point that government officials dedicate their time to find the missing remains of frozen and raped bodies planted deceptively into the Alaskan dirt by a monster? It seems self-evident that human life is important, but it only begins […]

  A Long Way Down is an interesting plot, centered around the serendipitous juncture of the suicidal on the most miserable day of the year, New Year’s Eve. It seems fitting that the beginning of a new cycle of life gravitates the suicidal, those who want to escape that cycle, toward self-murder. The voice over […]

Don Herzfeldt has a very unusually somber and morose feel to the mortality of humanity. Similar to It’s Such a Beautiful Day, Mr. Hertzfeldt represents the end of a human life in an absurdist manner – openly confronting the utter meaningless of the termination of one life in, not so much an outwardly expressed meaningless […]

A Decent Arrangement makes a gentle effort at the clash of civilizations, between the West and the East, in a frankly underlooked underbelly of the Orient – India – until recently; that is, until the wild success of Slumdog Millionaire. To the provincial American, it could be heard in the murmurs of business news that […]

In yet another tale of nihilistic Manhattan depravity, James White depicts a rowdy, restless, and agonized young man in the crutches of dealing with a world that quite simply does not give a damn. The self-destructive tendency of James, at first hinted when the film begins and then slowly but surely collects damning evidence, shows […]

Consider this another exhibit of the European man’s nihilism – and it is particularly interesting how Colin Farrell is so drawn to the dying breaths of European culture, with this being sequential to his work in In Bruges. Yet here, as opposed to examining the question of man’s mortality and the worth of justice, we […]