Tag / reviews

by Michael Janairo

Movie Review: ‘Dunkirk’

dunkirk-movie

A still from Dunkirk.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan has created some of the most memorable cinematic moments: the effect of the near-permanent daylight on a LA detective in Insomnia; the slippage of time between places created by a wormhole in Interstellar; the three-action-sequences-at-once in Inception; and the backwards in time unwinding of the plot of Memento. What these all have in common is a concern with time and how it functions—through the duration of a film, on the characters, and on the audience.

Though I have come to think of Nolan’s films as having great ideas, if not always satisfactory stories (the love conquers time as central to the plot of Interstellar, for example, felt like a let down), I was still eager to see Dunkirk. That the film’s running time was an hour less than Interstellar also helped.

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by Michael Janairo

Recent press: Quick Sip Reviews on my poem ‘Instructions for Astronauts’: ‘strange and haunting’

Thank you to Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews for taking the time to read my work and write about it. Very cool!

Quick snippet “strange and haunting” and “great”!

If you need more, here are some snippets from his review of “Instructions for Astronauts”:

This is a rather strange and haunting poem about humanity fleeing Earth in an attempt to survive, in an attempt to get to a different and better world, one unspoiled by our touch.

 

There is a strong religious element to the poem, all of the parts preceded by a biblical verse (save two) to set up how those sections read. These are the sections of the believers, of the grand hope for humanity. The renewal, the what-have-you. And I love that the poem sets itself up that way, with everything working and working toward this end, only to pull away at the ending …

He also calls the video “An amazing experience!”

Wow! Read what he wrote here.

Here’s the video

 

 

by Michael Janairo

Book review: “Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale” by Chuck Kinder

book-7121This review first appeared in the Albany Times Union (August 11, 2001)

Hilarious, loving characters in ‘Honeymooners’

Chuck Kinder’s first novel since “The Silver Ghost,” in 1978, “Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale” ($24; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 358 pages), is a hilarious, yet unflinching, eyes-against-the-windshield journey through years of booze, drugs, sex, friendships, lies and betrayals in the lives of a pair of promising young writers.

The freewheeling 1970s that Kinder recreates, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, belong within the literary tradition of the moveable feast Hemingway created out of Paris in the ’20s. Kinder’s writers, Ralph Crawford and Jim Stark, live “like bold outlaw authors on the lam from that gloomy tedium called ordinary life.” Kinder both celebrates and sends up their bravura and recklessness.

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by Michael Janairo

Haiku movie reviews, November 2015

Spectre (2015)
Throwback to Spectre
A wonderful reminder
Bond can be boring

Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Queen’s kid wants the Earth
Mila Kunis has other plans
— Toilet-scrubber’s might

Check out these previous Haiku movie reviews.

 

by Michael Janairo

Haiku movie reviews, September 2015

Two Days One Night (2014)
Co-workers are asked:
Vote for or against her job.
Is this a real thing?

John Wick (2014)
This guy is angry
He’ll mess you up very bad
Dressed in a sharp suit

by Michael Janairo

Haiku movie reviews, May 2015

Ex Machina (2015)
A hot bot twists minds
As it takes the Turing test
High-tech interlude

by Michael Janairo

Haiku movie reviews, March 2015

Song of the Sea (2014)
Selkie seeks her voice
Her brother’s kind of a jerk
The spirits are saints?

Vanity Fair (2004)
Novel: No hero
On Film: Reese Witherspoon stars
Story? Doesn’t work

2 Guns (2013)
Rat-a-tat-tat — bang!
Two big stars come out shooting
The bodies pile up

Fury (2014)
I watched this tank flick
Riding on an Amtrak train
— steel machines roll on

by Michael Janairo

#tbt review: Lisey’s Story by Stephen King

This review originally appeared in the Times Union on March 1, 2007.

liseysstory

“Lisey’s Story” by Stephen King. Read by Mare Winningham. Unabridged, 19 hours, 16 CDs. Simon & Schuster. $49.95.

In ancient Greek drama, deus ex machina was used when the plot got so out of control that only divine intervention could resolve it. “Lisey’s Story” is the opposite.

Lisey is the widow of a famous author still dealing with grief two years after his death. Her loneliness is convincing, as is the magical place — Boo’ya Moon — where her husband found inspiration and confronted horrors.

What bedevils the plot, though, is an insane stalker who terrorizes Lisey for her husband’s papers. This one-dimensional, inexplicable character clearly arrives for some anti-divine intervention to create chaos. King, however, eventually keeps the plot tidy and unsurprising.

Winningham does a winning job of conveying Lisey’s melancholy as well as other characters’ madness.

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by Michael Janairo

#tbt Book Review: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

This review was originally published May 8, 2005, in the Albany Times Union.

never let me go Kazuo Ishiguro is a master of the writing of memory. In fictions about an English butler, a Japanese artist and a world-renown pianist, he has found life-defining secrets, decisions and failures in the smallest moments, and uses them to create literary novels that read like thrillers.

His sixth novel, “Never Let Me Go” (Knopf; 282 pages; $24), includes emotionally engaging passages about friendship, love, duty, sex and betrayal in the lives of the three main characters; however, the effect is undermined by the world in which Ishiguro contains them.

The story centers on Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, whose friendship begins at Hailsham, a boarding school in the English countryside.

Kathy is reflective, passive and somewhat dreamy. She is the kind of girl who, while listening to a pop song, dances and holds a pillow, pretending it’s her baby. Ruth is bossy and likes to appear knowing; it gives her a power that attracts others to her. For example, she pretends to know more about chess than the older students, but when she shows Kathy how to play, she says all the pieces move in an L-shape. Tommy is athletic, warm-hearted and gullible, and he is mercilessly teased by his classmates. The boys enjoy setting off his uncontrollable rages, and the girls like to watch from the dorm windows.

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