Kevin Bowen

DOES ANYONE FEEL A DRAFT? With two first-round picks in the 2012 NFL draft, the Cleveland Browns were favorites to trade up to the No. 2 overall pick and land the rights to Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III. They were outbid by the Washington Redskins, whom Griffin would lead to the playoffs. The Browns…

GRAND Enough with the Wes Anderson-bashing. It’s as if, in having an imagination, Anderson has committed a crime. Can we just sweep words like “quirky” and “whimsy” under the bed? I’m thinking “dollhouse” could also burn to the ground or get tossed out the window like Jeff Goldblum’s unlucky cat in Anderson’s latest film. Are…

NOT MONUMENTAL In theory, George Clooney’s The Monuments Men tries to tell the story of the “greatest treasure hunt of all time” – the race by U.S. Army art curators to save European art gems from Nazi looting and destruction. In practice, it becomes a movie about old men in jeeps, asking for directions. The…

WHO’S HUSTLING WHOM? In American Hustle’s would-be signature moment, a con man shows a G-man a Rembrandt in a gallery. He explains that it’s really a fake. Who is the better artist, he asks, the original artist or the person who took the time and skill to fake it? Well, I would say the artist….

SLAVES TO HISTORY Among movies about race in America, how many great films have been made about slavery? We’ve seen pizza places going up in smoke for our sins (Do the Right Thing),  gentle drivers (Driving Miss Daisy), and sisterhoods of maids (The Help). Most of these films focus on the sixties or modern day occurrences….

SPACE CADET Alfonso Cuaron’s space station disaster saga Gravity is an intellectually soft video game’”a SuperMario of space debris, and a disappointment as a space survival story. A great deal of praise is being heaped on the 3-D outer space experience, labeled as immersive and hypnotic. Comparisons are being drawn to the upside-down, gravity-free experience…

WHAT A RUSH One day soon, or so we’re told, we will no longer drive. At the edge of the Age of the Driverless Car, taking a spin behind the wheel will become a thing of an increasingly distant past. Trendsetters assure us that this is the next great advance in safety and transportation.   Soon…

GET AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE The car porn chiller Getaway is a movie of wonder.   I wondered about the way the film was actually made – the shooting sequence, the extravagant car flips and pile-ups, the monotone acting.   Did Ethan Hawke actually shoot all of the gear shifting shots?   Or was that Ethan Hawke’s…

THEIR WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT In college more so than high school, I dressed like that: Black trench coat (but mine was brown).   Black slacks.   Doc Martens.   I never owned that Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, but I did own the album with that cover.   That was Gary King’s wardrobe on the last day of…

THE ACT OF REINVENTING A MASSACRE If there were a subtitle to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, it could be “A Re-enactment by Fun-Loving War Criminals.” In this unsettling documentary, a cadre of aging Indonesian gangsters relives their part in a pogrom against communists in the 1960s. In the political chaos of that time,…

OLD SCHOOL AND SCARY AS HELL In The Conjuring, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga take the roles of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, a Nick and Nora of supernatural troubleshooting.   The real-life Warrens are best known in some circles as investigators at Amityville, but The Conjuring comes from a lesser known incident earlier in…

ZOMBIE FILMMAKING There are huge citywide vistas of rambling crowds in World War Z, which may be the first film in which the cast seems to exceed the actual population of the planet.   Most of these people are infected with a zombie virus that turns them into rattlesnakes with overbites and clammy hair. The fantastic…

AN IRONING MACHINE, OR IRONY MAN In a movie where flying metal meets flying metaphors, Iron Man 3 is like rooting for a good hammer. Billionaire playboy industrialist Tony Stark makes it possible to pilot a fleet of Iron Man outfits by remote control while he munches In-N-Out burgers from miles away. Iron Man has…

MALICK IN WONDERLAND Here’s a fun discussion for sitting around the cinematic campfire: are the worst films by the best directors still better than 80 percent of what is released?   Are say, Bringing Out the Dead or The Hudsucker Proxy still relative carrots for the eyes when compared to the Transformer movies? Terrence Malick’s To…

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE? Things begin in the 60s in Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep. A group of radicals knock off a bank in Michigan. The ringleader, shown in dusty old FBI wanted posters, looks remarkably like The Sundance Kid. Who are those guys? That’s the question the Feds are asking, and…

WHERE’S THE MAGIC? Whatever positives and negatives lay within The Incredible Burt Wonderstone  – the latest Steve Carell mass-market comedy  – all I could do was wonder what happened to Steve Buscemi and the Coen Brothers. At one time Buscemi was arguably the foremost actor associated with the reticent Minnesota siblings, playing roles in all five of…

WHEN HISTORY IS NOT ENOUGH A series of releases in the last few months – Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Lincoln – have highlighted the ever-present conundrum of historical depiction in film, especially in regards to accuracy and storytelling. One film was threatened with Congressional investigations over its portrayal, and another took vast liberties with the…

THINGS ARE DEAD ALL OVER Summit Entertainment, the company that brought the Twilight series to the big screen, continues to explore horror film dating options with the satire Warm Bodies – an inevitability considering America’s love affair with zombies and hot teenage vampires. This RrrrrRomeo and Juliet story, based on the Isaac Marion novel, mashes…

BIGELOW  STAYS AT WAR The better part of the last decade saw Iraq War movie after Iraq War movie bite the dust. Something was off. Those war films continued to miss their mark until The Hurt Locker,   the first Middle Eastern war film from screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow. What was the difference? The…