items tagged with Lawless

“So, Mike, what did you think of the other 2012 movies you saw?”

Gosh, how nice of you to ask!

In descending order of appreciation ... .

ARGO

It sounds like an all-too-Hollywood idea for a high-concept suspense thriller: A sextet of State Department employees are trapped in Iran, and their only hope for escape lies with an ingenious CIA official who plans to free the Americans by having them pose as a location-scouting team for a Canadian science-fiction movie. Yet within its first minutes, director/star Ben Affleck’s Argo – based on a recently declassified chapter of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 – registers as terrifically, nerve-rackingly authentic, even if the film’s most enjoyable elements are, in truth, as Hollywood as they come.

THE POSSESSION

The new horror thriller The Possession is about a little girl who requires an exorcism to remove the evil dybbuk inhabiting her body, and it opens with a title card informing us that the film is “based on a true story.” You know what I’m aching to see one of these days? An exorcism-themed entertainment that isn’t based on a true story. Can you imagine how much fun these things could be if we weren’t consistently asked to believe in them?