the burning reel

Film 5 (365) Under Fire: Journalists in Combat A wall at the Newseum in Washington, DC holds the portraits of every American journalist killed in a conflict. As a combat photographer in the Marines I expected to see more combat than I did. In fact I didn't see any real  combat. The Grunts (what Marines call Infantrymen) would make light of this fact by nicknaming me "Combat". "Get over here Combat!" This makes me feel two very complicated emotions. On one hand I'm blessed. I have no physical or psychological damage to burden my family with. On the other hand I'm upset. Does it make me less of a Marine having not seen combat? Often I question what I might have done under those circumstances. Would I have buckled or "maned up" and focused on my mission? Would I have hid behind my lens and captured the events or picked up my rifle and fought back? Under Fire  interviews a group of men and women who never had that last option. The

Film 4 (365) Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream In New York City there are two Park Avenues. There's the one in Manhattan, where the largest concentration of Billionaires in the world are located, and there's the one in the Bronx north of the river where poverty is rampant. This film doesn't talk much about those north of the river. Instead it focuses one particular building. 740 Park. The most intriguing part of this film for me was the metaphor one psychiatrist uses in the beginning. He asks us to imagine sitting down to a game of Monopoly. The catch? All the properties have already been bought up and houses/hotels built. It wouldn't take long and you're worse off than when you started. This same psychiatrist did an experiment. He pitted two player against one another in Monopoly. After the throw of a dice one player is randomly selected to be the "wealthy" player. Every time the wealthy player crosses Go he gets $200,

Film 3 (365) Star Trek: Into Darkness Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) gets gratuitously undressed for a scene in "Star Trek: Into Darkness". Hey, you clicked on it didn't you? The first ten seconds of "Star Trek: Into Darkness" provides the viewer with a birds-eye-view kung-fu zoom. This film gives us plenty of interstellar kung-fu zooms much in the vain of the Battlestar Gallactica series. They still feel just as cheap in a multi million dollar franchise. Director J.J. Abrams is also consistent in providing us with his now trademark lens flares [see video below for examples]. I expected nothing less than a good ol' fashioned popcorn adventure ride and that's exactly what I got. In fact I expected it to be full-on action ad nauseum. It wasn't and I'm glad. There are a few moments for the characters to develop, but not many. If I have any beefs with this film it's that we aren't trusted as an audience. We're spoon fed every

Film 2 (365) Life is Beautiful Guido (Roberto Benigni) brings Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) to his home after helping her escape from her birthday party in Life is Beautiful . "Life is Beautiful" is one of those films I always put on the back burner with little interest in watching. I was in high school when this film was released in the US in 1999. I remember most vividly Roberto Benigni jumping over the seats at the Academy Awards as he climbed his way to the stage to accept his Oscar. Truthfully I didn't really know what the movie was about. It was in Italian and it took place during the war. Benigni road a bicycle through the streets with a goofy grin on his face. That's all I knew. Boring…  Boy, what was wrong with me!? This film is extremely touching. The trailer I've embedded below is quite deceiving. I ensure you this film will make you laugh hard and gut punch you with reality a moment later. I can't really say it's like anything I&

Film 1 (of 365) To the Wonder Screenshot from   Terrence Malick's   To the Wonder Terrence Malick's  To the Wonder  pushes the filmmaker's visual style further to abstract than it has ever been. For those of you unfamiliar with Malick's work he continues to push story and plot to the side in favor of powerfully emotional moving imagery. However, this is also a problem. The law of diminishing returns is alive and working in To the Wonder .  So much visual information is being poured over the viewer for such a long time (110 minutes) that I often found myself daydreaming. To be fair, Malick's Tree of Life  is much the same. For some reason I was touched and moved by that film so much more than I was by this one. In Tree of Life  we are in a childhood memory and experiencing an almost spiritual exploration of the character. This means the cinematography was visually supporting the narrative. Granted, it was booed at Cannes. So speaking for myself Tree of Lif

A screenshot of Olga Kurylenko from Terrence Malick's To the Wonder . I have long desired to watch one movie a day for a year and then write about it online (arguably I should be doing this anyway). First of all I'm doing it for primarily selfish reasons. I want to start expanding the library of cinema in my head and make myself a better storyteller. There are several movie "lists" out there that I can choose from: Roger Ebert's Great Movies  and the Criterion Collection  to name a couple. I could simply pick a list and start viewing from the first to the last. That sounds like a logistical nightmare. Instead I'll sample what I can of those lists  from what I have - namely Hulu and Netflix. This is all well and good, but I want your  input! What should I start with? It's my goal to have a weekly list released on Sunday to give you an idea of what I'll be watching for the next week. I'll spice it up each week with films ranging from co