Tag: Rosario Dawson

Top Five

“Top Five” is Chris Rock’s passion project, written, directed and starred in by the comedian.

For all of the surrealism and cinematic wizardry to be found in this year’s “Birdman”, the film was above all the story of a man grappling with fame and reality. He put on a play to be taken seriously while battling the demons of his past life as a superhero star as well as his press and his peers all out to destroy him.

Chris Rock’s “Top Five” is the more grounded version of this struggle, a less symbolic and more searing industry critique of celebrity, race dynamics and the press in a modern world. And while Michael Keaton has been stealing headlines for “Birdman’s” narrative similarities, Rock’s story is the truly meta portrait, a film he wrote, directed and starred in standing in for his own stand-up routine and opinions. Continue reading “Top Five”

Shattered Glass

Watching “Shattered Glass” makes me reconsider the importance I gave to all of my heated discussions in the newsroom. Here is a movie that treats human interest story telling with starry-eyed fascination and yet is so sympathetic and tepid without ever boiling down to the real story at stake.

The story of Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) is well known by me and any of my peers who have taken a journalistic ethics course in the last 10 years. Glass was a young reporter for The New Republic, a Washington D.C. based political mag with a distribution that included Air Force One, who in 1998 was found to have either partially or fully fabricated more than half of the 40 magazine features he wrote. He had for some time duped his editors by showing only his hand-written notes as evidence for fact checking. But when a small online tech magazine stumbled across a story he did on a hacker infiltrating a major software company, it was revealed that the company, the people, the locations and all the details had been complete fiction. To cover his tracks, he created phony business cards and websites and even had his brother pose as a source.

Glass’s story is more interesting than the movie is. Not only has “Shattered Glass” managed to horribly date itself in less than a decade, it goes about portraying Glass all wrong. Continue reading “Shattered Glass”

25th Hour

Spike Lee’s “25th Hour” is so closely tied to the immediate aftermath of New York after the 9/11 attacks, and it makes for one of the finest of the 2000s.

Spike Lee’s “25th Hour” tells the story of a man with one day of freedom before heading off to prison, and it strikes an emotional chord of the most complex nature, embodies the mood of New York City in the months after 9/11, paints a visually stunning narrative and reaches out to people of all sorts by examining their common regrets.

Edward Norton plays Monty Brogan in a spot-on performance. Monty is confident, but understated in his emotions, only occasionally going over the top when the film absolutely demands of it. In his dwindling freedom, he sees his achievements vanishing, he begins to question his friendships and he blames the world in the process. Lee stages an absolutely wrenching scene in which Monty stares into a bathroom mirror with a certain four letter word printed on it. His reflection yells back the most profane, insulting, hurtful comments about New York and everyone in it, and imagine the hit we take when he steps back and realizes that in this moment of passion, we are to blame for it all. Continue reading “25th Hour”