Film & Movie Archives
-
Selah And The Spades
The film centers around a 17-year-old black female, Selah (Lovie Simone). She’s an A student who captains a spirit squad, and doesn’t have sex, but these things don’t make her a good girl. Good girls don’t deal drugs, and Selah is not only an experienced dope pusher at the prestigious boarding school she attends somewhere outside Philadelphia – she also runs a tight ship. Making certain the Spades are the most dominant school clicks or what they call “factions” around campus. There is a tenuous truce between Selah’s Spades and the other factions, which often hints of an interesting backstory from their sophomore year.
-
FIRST COW
Otis “Cookie” Figowitz (John Magaro) finds himself in this uncompromising wooded land having signed on to be a cook for a couple of hard to please trappers. While foraging for truffles he finds King-Lu (Orion Lee) hiding in some bushes, naked and hungry. He’s been trying to outrun some Russian trappers who he unintentionally wronged. Cookie feeds and shelters him for the night, unbeknownst to his rough companion/employers. King-Lu leaves undetected in the morning. The two meet up again later, Cookie now unemployed. The two soon strike up a bond of friendship.
-
IRRESISTIBLE by Writer/Director Jon Stewart
As you might guess, “Irresistible” is a political satire making commentary on the exhausting and corrosive constant election cycle, media consultants, campaign finance and political party machinery. Gary Zimmer (Steve Carell) is a Democratic campaign spinner, consultant, strategist in Washington DC, one of his staff brings him a YouTube video of a guy in the heartland of Wisconsin, retired Marine Colonel Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper), shown making an impassioned speech during a Town Hall meeting about caring for those fallen on hard times since the closing of the town’s military base, which shrunk the town population from 15,000 to 5,000 practically overnight, destroying their economy.
- Film & Movie Archives, Film Festivals Archives, Mini Movie Reviews Archives, Movie News, Philly Spotlight
Philadelphia Latino Film Festival 2020 #PHLAFF2020
You don’t think about transsexualism being something that a small town in Panama would be encountering. But obviously, people needing to live their truth in the form of the sex they were not assigned at birth happens anywhere and everywhere. The complexities of the story play out so that you can sympathize with every member of the family, the wife Carol (Gaby Gnazzo) feels betrayed because she feels she’s been a good sport about him needing to play “dress up” now and again, making it a fun “girls night” out for dinner and a movie, but thought they agreed it was never something their three sons, friends, neighbors, co-workers etc…
-
Wrong Protagonist: THE HIGH NOTE
Yet, in my opinion, the movie should have centered around Grace Davis and been more of a drama, than comedy. I would have liked to have seen more of her struggle to come to grips with where she is in her career and life. And to have seen more of how she got to be this icon. We get some of all that, but it’s a side dish, instead of the main course.
