John Semley
By John Semley
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The Schmooze Captain America: Ironic Nostalgia or American Interventionism?
America Alone: Chris Evans as Captain America, surrounded by extra-evil Hydra soldiers. Image courtesy of Jay Maidment / Marvel Studios. “Don’t win the war without me,” the scrawny Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) pleads to his pal, James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan), in the first sepia-toned reel of Joe Johnston’s excellent “Captain America: The First…
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The Schmooze Friday Film: Alan Zweig and the Cinema of Emotional Crudity
In 2000, filmmaker Alan Zweig gained modest success on the festival circuit with “Vinyl,” a documentary probing the quirks and eccentricities of compulsive record collectors. (“Compulsive” referring not to some guy with a few hundred LPs, but to some guy who rents a U-Haul locker on the edge of town to serve as a supplementary…
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The Schmooze Them Low Down Yemen Blues
World music is a disingenuous marker for a genre. Besides presuming that popular forms of western (that is, American) music like pop, rock, rap, soul and country-western are something other than of the world, the term “world music” tends to flatten the rich idiosyncrasies and particularities of music coming from all corners of the globe….
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The Schmooze More Dude Than Duke in Coen Brothers’ ‘True Grit’
As with Henry Hathaway’s 1969 film, Joel and Ethan Coen’s remake of “True Grit” (which is really another, truer, adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel) follows a young girl in pursuit of her father’s killer. Played here by new recruit Hailee Steinfeld, the impossibly precocious Mattie Ross hires a surly, drunken, tough-as-nails federal marshal (Jeff Bridges)…
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The Schmooze Friday Film: ‘Black Swan’
Excepting the Coen brothers’ “True Grit” remake, or Disney’s blockbusting, multidimensional sequel to “Tron,” is there any film more anticipated this awards season than Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan”? Let’s rephrase that, for the sake of brevity. Is there any non-Jeff Bridges film more anticipated this awards’ season than “Black Swan”? Probably not. Ever since the…
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Culture Richler’s Version
‘Barney’s Version” is a film a decade in the making. The unusually long development and production schedule wasn’t the result of the filmmaker fine-tuning digital-effects shots or the studio slowly unfurling some bloated marketing campaign, as is often the case. Rather, it was a matter of producer Robert Lantos ensuring that everything about “Barney’s Version,”…
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The Schmooze The Shaming of Eliot Spitzer
Is there anything more reprehensible than white-collar crime? Certainly, there are any number of moral offenses that may trump the impulses of rich white men to make themselves even richer. But even the most egregious of these can be rationalized (rightly or wrongly) through psychological profiling and the ascription of some mental disorder or social…
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The Schmooze A Guitar God and his Musical Monsters
When I phoned Gary Lucas this week he was right in the middle of renewing his Forward subscription. “I’m a religious reader,” he punned effortlessly. He also had his cell phone pressed to his other ear, waiting to buy concert tickets. It comes as little shock that the prolific composer, songwriter, guitar legend and musical…
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