With the annual awards meeting of New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO) on Sunday, December 8th, I feel like I am cramming for a final exam made all the more daunting by my failure to have done any homework the entire year. In my case, the homework was the Hollywood movies that my colleagues cover methodically while I am off tracking down obscure neorealist fiction films from the global semi-periphery or snarling Marxist documentaries. My job is made easier by the buckets of screeners the studios begin sending me as a member of NYFCO in mid-November, most of which I hurl into the garbage can after 15 minutes or so. This year the discards include “Bling Ring” and “Spring Breakers”, which now that I think about it might have come in under the five-minute mark. In fact I might have hit “eject” on “Spring Breakers” during the opening credits.
Perhaps as a function of the grim economic reality, the studios have put their muscle behind two films that depart from the sort of vacuous escapism that most moviegoers dote on. They are “Out of the Furnace” that opens this week at better movie theaters everywhere and “Nebraska” that has been around for a few weeks. While the reviews for “Out of the Furnace” have been mixed (64 percent “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, where my reviews appear), “Nebraska” is right up there with other Oscar contenders, registering a 91 percent “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics generally view the two films as being cut from the same cloth as John Steinbeck or Woody Guthrie. A.O. Scott of the N.Y. Times describes “Nebraska” as depicting “a small-town America that is fading, aging and on the verge of giving up…blighted by envy, suspicion and a general failure of good will. Hard times are part of the picture, and so are hard people.” full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/10/the-hollywoodization-of-the-heartland/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
