Mennonite Movie Reviews Archive
While We’re Young
Noah Baumbach’s new film, While We’re Young, is his most mature (no pun intended) and funny film to date. Each of his films (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg and Frances Ha) combine funny dialogue with the painful drama of relationships. Serious subjects, but the director handles them with such a light touch that we find ourselves laughing at these characters before we realize how much we may resemble them. While We’re Young opens with a middle-age couple, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), watching over their friends’ baby, trying to calm it by telling […]
The Divergent Series: Insurgent
The Divergent series began with last year’s Divergent, a film based on the first novel of a poorly written dystopian trilogy aimed at teenagers and young adults. The series was made to cash in on the phenomenal box office success of The Hunger Games. Both series are made by Lionsgate, a major non-Hollywood studio, which gives them a distinct non-Hollywood flavor, though obviously does not guarantee the avoidance of typical Hollywood flaws. Insurgent also suggests that nonconformity and challenging the status quo are positive attributes and should be encouraged among the young. The Divergent series is set in a future version […]
Cinderella
When I was a kid, we only owned two movies: Disney’s Bambi and Cinderella. And since Bambi’s mom [SPOILER ALERT] gets shot by a hunter and dies, I’m sure we never watched it more than three times. Our VHS copy of Cinderella, however, we wore to shreds. To this day, my mom can quote several scenes in that movie verbatim—and she’s not a movie quote person. Thus, when I learned Disney had made a live-action version, my inner 6-year-old did pirouettes of glee. The film also presents an interesting vision of racial equality, where races as we know them live […]
