The Other Side of Cinema: Argo (2012) and Seven Psychopaths

by Tony Dayoub

Argo does an outstanding job of establishing both its world and its central conceit in the movie's prologue. Intercutting between documentary footage and the type of comic book frames used in movie storyboards, director Ben Affleck establishes a key fact that will surprise younger viewers, the closeness of the U.S. and its one-time ally Iran in the years just before the dictatorial Shah was forced to flee the country during 1979's Islamic Revolution. Subsequent sequences depicting protesters overrunning the gates of the American embassy are evocative not only of the actual events they cover, but of the recent embassy protests in Benghazi, Libya where Ambassador Chris Stevens was assassinated. Much of what will no doubt fuel Argo's Oscar campaign—or its chances for Best Picture in the minds of Academy voters—is this prescience or timing.

Movie Review: Limitless (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

If a film's protagonist is supposed to be the smartest person in the world and the viewer is often one step ahead of him then something must be wrong with the movie. And so it is with the flawed Limitless, a cautionary bit of sci-fi addressing what could go wrong if an average man suddenly finds a means to becoming a super-intellectual for 24 hours at a time, provided he continues to take a "magic" pill. Even the casual moviegoer can figure the way most of the movie's situations will turn out without furrowing their brow too much.

Movie Review: Bright Star

by Tony Dayoub

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

—John Keats

Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water

—the epitaph Keats requested on his deathbed

A return to form for Jane Campion (The Piano), the ethereal Bright Star proves simpler films with a narrower scope can be just as rewarding as the more ambitious ones.