Far Flungers

Charlatan, Louisiana

Omer M. Mozaffar

On Netflix Instant

Robert Duvall’s “The Apostle” (1997) is the story of a preacher who believes he has unique permission to phone call the Divine. As is the case with such preachers, the rules of goodness and morality seem to apply to everyone else before they apply to him. Meaning, he is above the law until he gets frightened for breaking the law. So, his combination of impious exhilaration, impatient devotion, and self-righteous rage reveals a man in sunglasses, open palms, and fiery sermons, who plants trees while burning bridges. I love this movie as much as I despise its central character. This movie exists only because of its central character.

Reactionary men who fear and hate strong women

What you are about to read may shock you. It’s all true, and it happened to me. It involves censorship and the movies and one man’s loathing of strong contemporary women.

I love motion pictures, and I love writing about them. I have been a movie critic in Buffalo, New York for a number of years. Reviewing films rose out of my passion for both journalism and cinema, the perfect combination.

In preparing this column, I thought about various headlines for it. Something like: The Perils Of Movie Reviewing. Or perhaps: What’s Happening To Freedom Of The Press? Or maybe this one: There Truly Are Reactionary Men Who Fear And Hate Strong Women.

A sermon no one can sleep through

Gerardo Valero

Many of today’s films seem to be made solely for financial reasons, but the case of “The Exorcist” is more complex than most. It was a tremendous financial success, the all-time box office champ for a while, but only a psychic could have predicted that people would line up to see a movie of this nature.

Tony is troubled as you can get:The villains of “Iron Man 2”

Ali Arikan

I’ve always thought Tony Stark looked a bit like a porn star. It wasn’t just the pencil moustache, though that certainly helped. It was his aura, his veneer of venal virtue, his lascivious lothario lifestyle. Plus he was a right-wing arms merchant with a dodgy heart and a drinking problem, who spent half his time in a robot suit serving shoe-pie to people in full anonymity. Even in the Marvel Universe, where other superheroes were only occasionally allowed to venture into shades of grey, Tony Stark stood out as a genuinely troubled character. 

I’m with the Gleaners

Olivia Collette

The Internet is a nit-picky place, so I’m going to put it out there right away: I’m no linguist. But I’ve been bilingual since birth, and I also learned Italian, German and Spanish along the way. That’s why it’s always fascinated me how languages can be so functionally distinct.

I noticed that in Latin languages, nouns tend to describe what a thing is, while Germanic languages likely tell you what it does. A great example is the French word for skunk, “mouffette,” which recalls the creature’s billowing tail with “mouffe” and denotes its small size with “ette.” Compare it to the German equivalent, “Stinktier,” which literally means stinky animal.

Crime in the emptiness of Los Angeles

Michael Mann’s “Heat” ranks right up there with the best of the crime genre from “Rififi” to “The Godfather”. In fact, it is in my opinion the single greatest Los Angeles crime epic of all time, for it encompasses themes and visuals rarely achieved by productions. “Heat” is very ambitious and the end result is nothing short of a larger-than-life epic grandeur of a film.

To travel and live without reasons

When I observed the lifestyle of Ryan Bingham in Jason Reitman’s wonderful movie “Up in the Air” early in this year, Lawrence Kasdan’s 1988 movie “The Accidental Tourist” came to my mind. Like Ryan, Macon Leary (William Hurt) knows a lot about traveling around by plane. He can tell you how to pack your bag as small as possible. 

It takes all kinds of critters

There have been many horror movies about deranged characters and their insane deeds which make most of us cringe. As a diligent moviegoer, I have frequently encountered such movies, and I found some of them were enjoyable while others were repellent. While I saw a sense of humor in that ruthless South Korean horror movie “I Saw the Devil” (2010), my eyeballs were rolling in disbelief and disgust in the case of a movie called “The Human Centipede” (2009) and its more atrocious sequel.

The James Bond template

Gerardo Valero

Attending the latest James Bond films has been a tradition in my family ever since I can remember, and why not? If anybody went to the movies as often as we did, they were bound to get plenty of “B” grade turkeys, yet the years made clear that just about any 007 film would have something more to offer than most, at the very least those terrific production values.

The first one I can recall going to was “Goldfinger” sometime around age 9, to one of those theatrical re-re-releases which were so common before the days of multiplexes and home video. I have to admit that what really motivated me to go see it back then was solely the possibility of being witness to the cinematic version of my old Corgi Aston Martin DB5 model car but, like most audiences, I found many facets which I had become familiar with, in other movies, being taken to a whole new level.

“Moozlums” have been here for a long time

Omer M. Mozaffar

Qasim Basir presents his first feature film, “Mooz-lum,” featuring Danny Glover, Nia Long, and Roger Guenveur Smith. Based on true events, it follows the story of Tariq (Evan Ross, son of Diana Ross) as he begins college, hoping to escape his childhood struggles. Estranged from his mother and sister, he spent his youth living at times with a strict, religious father and at times in a local madrassa (Islamic seminary). He is a Muslim college student, enrolling in the Fall of 2001. Simply, it is a story of a man trying to hide from the boy within him, just as all hell is about to break loose.

The movie opens nationally on Friday, 2/11. The title is a play on a common mispronunciation of “Muslim.” I shrug when President Obama, despite his childhood in Indonesia, pronounces the term as “Muz-lem,” though that is still better than the archaic “Moslem.” The point here is not that anyone is intentionally mispronouncing the name. Rather, those of us with Muslim names

The Arikan Agenda: The Best Films of 2011

Ali Arikan

A few weeks ago on Facebook — that sly keeper of family secrets, whose memory seems to have increased incrementally with its new Timeline mumbo-jumbo — an actor of some repute posted a list of the best Twitter accounts of 2011, as compiled by a wholly forgettable outlet. He had been placed relatively highly, and someone commented that it was a very subjective list. Apart from the fact that taking issue with “a list of the best Twitter accounts of 2011, lol” is by definition absurd, the statement presented a logical fallacy (I am fully aware of the irony of regarding a throwaway Facebook comment in such depth). All lists are subjective: that’s why they’re lists. Nonetheless, this fairly simple fact gets lost in the year-end frenzy as interested parties start calling for the list-maker’s head, like angry villagers wielding pitchforks, if and when their favoured books, albums, films, etc fail to place on a given critic’s compilation of the year’s best.

‘Ponyo,’ the missing Oscar nominee,by Michael Mirasol of Manila

The Oscar nominees have been announced, now cinephiles everywhere have begun nitpicking amongst the nominations. Some will note those that should have and shouldn’t have been nominated, but one almost criminal omission from the Best Animated Film category was the absence of PONYO, Hayao Miyazaki’s latest work for Studio Ghibli.

In terms of filmmaking mastery, one can mention the name Miyazaki in the same breath as Spielberg or Scorsese. His works are beloved by animators, audiences, and critics around the world.

The People vs. George Lucas

Gerardo Valero

A documentary called “The People vs. George Lucas” gives disgruntled, hard-core, “Star Wars” a chance to vent on the decisions George Lucas has made over the last several years, regarding the alterations to his beloved original trilogy as well as the overall outcome of that series’ prequels. It may be safe to say that these fans’ gargantuan expectations were not fully met.

I have to wonder if such expectations were realistic to begin with, I also ask myself if it was the world we live in today that drastically changed the rules of the game for the release of the maligned prequels. Let’s face it, the insufferable Ewoks never had to face the same fate that Jar Jar Binks did when days after the release of the first prequel, a web site called www.jarjarbinkssucks.com became the talk of the web in its early days.