Asher Gelzer-Govatos fell in love with film in high school, where the one two punch of Lawrence of Arabia and The Third Man opened his eyes to the beauty of the filmed image. Asher is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He lives with his wife and children in Columbia, Missouri.
In the past year or so, the “faith based” movie market has experienced something akin to a gold rush. It has been a decade since the arrival of mega-hit The Passion of the Christ, but despite a few modest exceptions, the niche of films aimed specifically at devout (Christian) audiences has not been mined for its true worth. That …
The battle of Myeongnyang is a touchstone in the Korean national consciousness. For Americans it would be something like Bunker Hill (though the closest analogue in history would be Salamis, where a small Athenian fleet repelled the massive navy of the Persians). It’s no wonder then that director Lee Han-Min would want to give the …
Thank you so much for agreeing to answer some questions for me. First off, how did you get involved in “The Admiral: Roaring Currents”? What drew you to the material?
“Attica! Attica!” That chant soldified Al Pacino’s performance in Dog Day Afternoon as an iconic one. Pacino’s role as Sonny is one of the most celebrated of his career, and rightly so. As happens, though, the towering greatness of Pacino has overshadowed the reality of the person he portrays. Dog Day Afternoon retells a true story on the …
Well here I am, reviewing MASH. It’s hard enough approaching one of the canonical films of Robert Altman, harder still considering this is the film that launched his career. But MASH also happens to be the only Robert Altman film adapted into a long running, utterly iconic sitcom. While I’m no super fan of the series, I’ve seen …
To call the history of the interplay between movies and video games “spotty” would be to commit an act of startling charity. Who could forget such classic films as Double Dragon or Street Fighter, not to mention the whole oeuvre of the highly esteemed Uwe Boll?…
Cinemanovels, the title of the new film written and directed by Terry Miles, anagrammatizes as “Nice man loves” or, as I prefer, “Nice loves, man” (or even, if you want to get adventurous, “Non-slave mice”). I tell you this not because these word jumbles have any bearing on the plot or themes of the film, but because, in spite of their banality, they …
The romantic comedy, like all genres, has familiar rhythms and tropes, ones that connoisseurs know by heart. David Wain’s new comedy They Came Together attempts to jam all those tropes in a blender, set it on obliterate, and come up with the ultimate satirical smoothie of rom com blandness. It’s a terrific conceit, admirably executed …
Britain has produced a fair number of dark comedies with murderer protagonists, the greatest being the Ealing Studios classic Kind Hearts and Coronets. The new film Whoops! attempts to follow in that lineage, with a twist: Rose Clements is a faithful wife and mother who just keeps accidentally murdering strangers. It’s a setup with a …
The story told in Closer to the Moon is the sort lonely obnoxious people like to store away so they can have examples ready to prove their point that truth is stranger than fiction. In 1959 in Romania, five well educated Jews, former rising stars in that country’s communist party, robbed a…