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Hammer and Thump
Posts by Locke Peterseim
I do struggle with my sometimes unreasonable hatred of Disney. My seething loathing for the Mouse does not come easy. I wrestle, almost daily it seems, with what often feels like an irrational, petty, personally embittered war on a media conglomerate that apparently provides so much happiness, and joy to so many people, including many […]
Read MoreI went into The Gambler with every bit of trepidation you’re probably feeling right now as you look at that poster: “Eh, Mark Wahlberg? Gambling movie? Remake?” But I found this new version of The Gambler, sharply written by William Monahan (based on James Toback’s original 1974 script) and vividly directed by Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist, […]
Read MoreTrust me, I well know that books are not movies and movies are not books—I’m fully aware of (and fascinated by) the differences in how the two mediums tell stories and create meaning and experience. And I also know that in this age of Internet tribalism, Hel hath no impotent, squealing fury like a fan […]
Read MoreDuring World War II, British mathematician Alan Turing and a secret team of cryptologists eventually succeeded in using an early electronic computing machine to crack the seemingly uncrackable German Enigma machine code and help bring the war to a swifter close. In 1952, Turing, his immeasurable contribution to the British war effort still a state […]
Read MoreDirector Bennett Miller has been collecting praise for his smart, restrained film-making since his debut documentary The Cruise in 1998, through his Oscar-nominated Capote in 2005, and 2011’s Moneyball. Miller’s latest film, Foxcatcher (written by E. Max Frye and Capote writer Dan Futterman) is yet another look at real-life characters, this time the Olympic-medal-winning brothers […]
Read MoreA couple years ago I spoke with local Chicago documentary film maker Darryl Roberts about his film America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments, the second in his ongoing series about our modern culture’s ideas of and obsession with beauty and our sometimes warped self-images. Roberts’ latest documentary is America the Beautiful 3: The Sexualization […]
Read MoreChristopher Nolan loves his daughter very much. He would like you to know that his parental love for his daughter is super large. Larger than your love for anything you might love in your lesser, non-blockbuster-making ways. Once a cold, calculating director, Christopher Nolan now believes in love, and his love for his daughter is […]
Read MoreLet’s start at the end. Stylistically and thematically, the closing credits of writer-director David Ayer’s WWII tank film, Fury, starring Brad Pitt, are some of the most fascinatingly jarring of recent years. The proceeding film is an often brutal, gruesome look at the psychological cost of war, namely the anger—yes, the fury—that some long-time soldiers […]
Read MoreHeading to the press screening of David Fincher’s Gone Girl, I was, as usual, running late. But as I rushed from bus to cab to dashing down crowded Chicago streets, I reassured myself that even if I was five minutes late, I had a pretty good sense of what I’d miss in that opening: a […]
Read MoreIn 1996 the San Jose Mercury News published (in print and on the nascent World Wide Web) a series of investigative articles entitled “Dark Alliance” by journalist Gary Webb. In the articles, Webb stated that in the ’80s the CIA not only supported cocaine smuggling out of Nicaragua in order to fund its clandestine war […]
Read MoreA few years ago, director Adam Wingard and his creative partner, writer Simon Barrett began intriguing horror fans with low-fi, often deftly deconstructive and ironic films like the mumblecore serial-killer film A Horrible Way to Die, the V/H/S horror anthologies, and last year’s terrific You’re Next. While part of the mumblecore film un-movement with pals […]
Read MoreThe Skeleton Twins feels so clichéd “indie” that it almost folds over into meta. That’s not entirely a bad thing—at least we’ve reached the point where delicately essayed indie-feelin’ films about human people not wearing superhero costumes or trying to blow each other up are created and appreciated often enough to be criticized for familiar […]
Read MoreAt first blush, Love is Strange, independent writer and director Ira Sachs’ sixth feature, feels Woody-Allen familiar: Gentle piano music plays; a nattily dressed couple (Alfred Molina’s George and John Lithgow’s Ben) lovingly bicker; and diverse but attractive characters gather to sing songs in a perfectly appointed New York apartment. But Love is Strange quickly […]
Read MoreLet’s be clear at the start: I enjoyed The Guardians of the Galaxy. Quite a bit, thank you. I had much of the good-times happy smiles with it. I laughed a whole lot, often heartily and with great joy. It’s a totally entertaining lark (with a bit of heart), and if you like fizzy, sci-fi […]
Read MoreThree years ago, writer-director Mike Cahill and his collaborator, writer-actress Brit Marling, helped lead a new sub-genre of science fiction with their breakout film Another Earth: intensely thoughtful and intelligent, smaller-budget films that aren’t afraid to raise complicated existential issues. Cahill’s sophomore feature I Origins may have a somewhat larger budget and more expansive locales […]
Read MoreNo, I’m not being facetious. This isn’t winking satire. I’m stone cold Steve Austin serious: Transformers: Age of Extinction is quite possibly the single most important cinematic document so far about how America fever dreams itself into continued existence in the 21st Century. For the most part, critics have been baffled and stymied by Michael […]
Read MorePaul Haggis spent two decades in the trenches writing for sit-coms like Diff’rent Strokes, One Day at a Time, Who’s the Boss, and Facts of Life and TV dramas such as LA Law, thirtysomething, and Walker Texas Ranger. But ten years ago, Haggis broke out big as a film writer, with back-to-back Best Original Screenplay […]
Read MoreI once reveled in mocking and deriding Tom Cruise for the obvious reasons: the shallow All-American Super-Jock swagger; the intense self-deprecatingly positivity; the mish-mash of film choices from soggily pretentious Oscar-lickers (Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man, The Last Samurai) to cloying, image polishers (A Few Good Men, Jerry McGuire) to silly popcorn […]
Read MoreLast summer, upon surviving The Lone Ranger, I felt I’d finally come to some sort of Zen-like epiphany about these giant Disney marketing events masquerading as “movies”: They aren’t really films at all; not in any classic sense of what cinema is, what it means. My weary separate peace with these packaged, pre-sold, cross-promoted, brand-leveraged, […]
Read MoreLast fall I chatted with writer-director Jim Mickle about his cannibal-family horror film We Are What We Are. As we discussed the style of that film, Mickle (who comes off incredibly nice and intellectually and artistically curious) mentioned that his next film was set in the ’80s and had a very different, more neon, visual […]
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