Pictureland

Nothing's gonna stop us now!  Except possibly for some smarmy lip syncing amid a gratuitous dance scene.  Bill Heder and Kristin Wiig in The Skeleton Twins. Even if you attend a screening of The Skeleton Twins with an awareness of the film's subject matter, you probably won't expect to see its main characters winding and kicking along a hillside at dusk, led by the embodiment of death, prior to the closing credits.  No, if America has a danse macabre, that's hardly it, even if we (like Bergman) were to pluck from history the inspiration and form of such a procession.  That's just not us.  One can report this with certainty, if not relief.  The problem, dear friends, the worrisome thing, is that our dance might be best performed to a Starship song.  So it goes, at least, in The Skeleton Twins. Bill Heder and Kristen Wiig are Billy and Maggy, brother and sister, if not actually twins. They haven't talked in decade at the outset of The Skeleton Tw...

Apparently, he's a pitbull.  Usually gentle, cute in his way perhaps, but not to be crossed.  This Brookyn bartender Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy) as conceived by writer Dennis Lehane in The Drop .  Mr. Lehane sets up a rather simplistic case of nature versus nurture in a harsh, twilight Brooklyn where it's tough going for dog and man alike. The Drop is notable as the final work of actor James Gandolfini.   He plays Bob's cousin Marv, which happens to be the name on the front of the bar he has long operated in a Brookyn neighborhood which shows no signs of gentrification.  But as The Drop begins, we find out that Cousin Marv's is Marv's in name only.  He was muscled out of ownership some eight years previous and is now beholden to Chechen gangsters.  At the outset, speaking in an adopted accent, Hardy as the soft-spoken Bob explains that many such bars are used as drops for bag men, all the city's dirty money funneling into slots and fake kegs, u...

At a certain point, Frank, the man in the very large papier mache head, shows up at South By Southwest, the annual Austin, Texas festival of music, film and general hipness, as it seems he must. During the brief glances we get of Frank's band, Soronprfbs (don't try to pronounce it), milling amongst the other SXSW performers and attendees, there is a brief, amusing, two-person, street summit of bodies beneath large, fabricated noggins.  These big heads seem to tilt slightly in recognition, as if echoing souls from a distant, disproportionate realm who have found a fellow traveler. While the fleeting, amusing encounter might seem to present but two characters adding flavor to the human stew about them, there's no reason to believe they're at all the same.  The square, crudely-rendered, television-like head staring back at Frank is probably little more than a band's temporary gimmick, perhaps a festival attendee's costuming lark.  For Frank, the oblate dome at...

Darkness, darkness.  Poor Father James (Brendan Gleeson) may be a priest in Count Sligo, but his parish seems more a hell on earth than the picturesque Atlantic Coast of Ireland. This apparently good priest is made to answer not only for the trangressions of his church, but all of the pent-up outrage of his country in the early 21st century. "You have to put up with shit like this on a regular basis?" asks his visiting daughter, Fiona (Kelly Reilly).  "There's a lot of it going around, let's put it that way," responds the weary man. Calvary is, among several other things, the result of writer and director John Michael McDonagh avoiding the sophomore slump much more nimbly than his brother Martin.  The younger McDonagh followed his highly original first feature In Bruges (2008) with the deeply mediocre Seven Psychopaths (2012).  Perhaps the moral of that brief story is to make sure that you have Brendan Gleeson at the head of your cast. Gleeson pl...

No, it's not that film.  Not a Road Warrior for a new generation, a new century.   The Rover is set amid the seared, forbidding landscape of Australia's Outback.  The time is post-something - maybe not post- apocalypse, but post-"collapse."  There is violence.  There are vehicles and pursuit.  There is at the story's center a man whom one might well characterize as a road warrior, though for what he so single-mindedly fights besides the return of his automobile, one is hard pressed to determine for most of the film's duration.  And yet.... Ply as it might the lonely roads of nether Australia, David Michod's The Rover confines itself to a very small emotional map.  So too that grim fellow in the short pants and dress shirt, both long absent from the wash, hell bent to recover his car.  All the more impressive that The Rover so involves us in its story, it's anti-hero's almost inexplicable quest, wrings so much emotion out of such a ...

Those all-too-willing participants in reality shows have wrought even more damage than is obviously the case.  Of course, there is the mental toll:  billions of brain cells, lonely outposts of thought surrendering to the onslaught of gleeful indignity, seemingly as many as would drown in a Pacific of bad whisky, to the likes of the Kardashians, Real Housewives of Atlanta, New York, Orange County...the pawn shop owners, the late-to-the-party celebrities...ad nauseam.  All of this, presumably, to distract viewers from the pain, the loneliness, or just the oppressive banality of their lives.   Less obvious perhaps is the obscuring of the value of life stories wrought with any measure of thoughtfulness. Stories that not only distract us, remove us for a time from the pressing matters of our existence, but inevitably carry us back to a reflection on those same lives.  For however banal, uneventful, or ordinary... be it ever so humble, there is no story like ...