“My first draft of this review started with a disclaimer saying that, whatever my opinions of Crazy Rich Asians may be, its all-Asian cast is worth celebrating as a landmark for representation. Then my editor sent me an article explaining how the movie’s depiction of Singapore is analogous to a depiction of America only featuring white people, and now I don’t know what to think. In the context of Hollywood’s shameful history of white actors playing Asian characters, this still feels like a step in the right direction, though it’s hard to forgive the ignorance of Singaporean racial diversity. This stuff is complicated and there are two sides to every issue. Anyway, Crazy Rich Asians is awful.”
Finally tapping into the coveted “Action Movie-Goers Ages 55-64” demographic is _RED,_ the first movie to fully recognize that the bad-ass old guy is the most bad-ass bad-ass possible. For that matter, I think I am not exaggerating when I say that, by and large, the older the practitioner, the more raw the feat. I dare you to name one thing that’s not raw as hell when done by a dude or lady of years. Doing push-ups. Chopping firewood. Yelling at Koreans. Speaking to a nation. Chugging a beer.
Blue Valentine writer and director Derek Cianfrance’s latest film The Place Beyond the Pines is, if anything, a study in what Robert Penn Warren, legendary 1940s author of All the King’s Men, calls “the awful responsibility of Time.” We begin with Ryan Gosling’s character Luke Glanton, a reckless circus-performing motorcyclist. Seemingly out of nowhere, Luke has great responsibility thrust upon him when an old flame from an upstate New York carnival stop steps back into his life with his infant son.
