Category: Jenna’s Reviews

The Wolf of Wall Street: Fuck This Movie, Fuck Jordan Belfort, Fuck The Audience, And, I Guess, Fuck Me Too

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET


The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Screenplay by Terence Winter
180 min.

Spoilers ahead.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. No siree.

I’d gone to the theater that snowy midday to see Inside Llewyn Davis again. I just wanted to once more curl up in some good ol’ depressing Coen brothers greatness, goddammit. But it was sold out! And the only movie that wasn’t was ol’ Martin Scorsese’s newest– The Wolf of Wall Street. I’d had mixed feelings about seeing it to begin with, but my boredom outweighed my uncertainty and I figured ‘ah, what the hell.’

Ah, I left the theater fuming with anger. I don’t just mean annoyed—I mean actually fuming mad and ranting about it in public. My anger seemed to stem from my inability to understand if this movie was brilliantly orchestrated as a relentless and morally superior lecture, or if was just a passive and amoral romp, letting the viewer decide what’s right and wrong. What I did know was that I resented the hell out of it—and I needed yell so from the top deck of my million dollar yacht in front of a thousand of my closest friends.
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Male Gaze, Female Snooze: A Review of ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’

Adele Exarchopoulos Lea Seydoux


Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
Screenplay by Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia Lacroix
Adapted from the comic book ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ by Julie Maroh
179 min.

Spoiler-free.

As a jaded New Yorker, I typically don’t drool over well-reviewed movies on principle. I’m skeptical of ‘buzz’ and ‘hype’ of any kind, and this overhyped movie in particular seemed to be generating some intriguingly divisive opinions. Between the overwhelming amount of reviewers (largely male) heralding it as “breathtaking,” and the author of the original graphic novel, Julie Maroh, calling it a flat-out straight mens’ porno fantasy, I found myself reading articles about the controversy before I even knew it was a movie slated to come out.

Now call me biased, but I’m going to trust the lesbian author over the male French director when it comes to who really “gets” lesbian love and sex. And as such, I did what any dismissive, self-respecting woman would do and wrote it off as something to miss. But eventually, the whole fantastic vs. awful rhetoric—plus some light peer pressuring from a coworker—finally got me off my ass and into the theater to give it a fair shot. Hey, we already know I’m down to make myself miserable when it comes to movies, so why not?
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Smug Film At The Movies #1: Escape From Tomorrow

escape


Escape From Tomorrow (2013)
Written and Directed by Randy Moore
90 min.

Last Friday, Smug Film critics Cody Clarke and Jenna Ipcar went to see Escape from Tomorrow at the IFC Center. Here are their respective spoiler-free takes on it.
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The World’s End: Not The Seth Rogen One, The Other One

bam
From left: Moderator, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost

The World’s End (2013)
Directed by Edgar Wright
Written by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright

It’s a tough thing to come back to your hometown after years of avoidance. Revisiting streets and buildings you once knew so well almost makes you feel like you’re walking through your own personal shrine to your past. One might even categorize it as an almost otherworldly experience.

But the nostalgia only lasts so long, as you slowly realize that really nothing has stayed the same: a Starbucks has replaced your local coffee shop, the faces you once knew have been replaced with haggard and older models, the school bully who made your life hell doesn’t look twice at you, and the punks on the corner have blue-ink blood and don’t back down even after you’ve knocked their heads off.

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4 Halfway Decent Movies In Theaters Now (Hannah Arendt, Frances Ha, The Bling Ring, Berberian Sound Studio)

I’ve been hitting the ol’ theaters hard this month, and I’ve found most of these movies to be decidedly satisfactory. I didn’t ‘love’ any of these, but I would say that if you’re interested in seeing them, you’ll probably enjoy them:

hannah

Hannah Arendt (2012) | Dir. Margarethe von Trotta | 113 min.
Continue reading 4 Halfway Decent Movies In Theaters Now (Hannah Arendt, Frances Ha, The Bling Ring, Berberian Sound Studio)