Amoeba Music

David Mamet’s pitch dark morality play about capitalism as a nihilistic force for poisoning the human spirit was turned into a film in 1992 with an all star cast featuring Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, and Alan Arkin. All of them play miserable salesmen both complicit and bitterly at odds with having their sense of identity wrapped up in their weekly sales figures. The actors work the odd time signatures of Mamet’s trademark dialogue and the lines are delivered with a seething intensity that leaves you a little shaken.

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Robert Altman’s last film is an adaptation of NPR staple “A Prairie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor’s liberal humanist weekly revue of folky Americana music, wry story telling, and gentle send ups of modern mores and it couldn’t be a more fitting film to go out on. Altman uses the big cast putting on their last show plot as a means of meditation on different kinds of death: the death of an old timer, the death of live radio as an art form and he creates something moving without being cloying, heartfelt without being sentimental....

The inside scoop on the “Fair and Balanced” news network and how its notorious enthusiasm for “truthiness” made it the perfect cable news counterpart to the Bush years. Outfoxed is a scathing indictment of Rupert Murdoch’s crappy idea of journalism put into 24 hour news cycle form. From former employees giving the lowdown on Fox’s shady way of skewing coverage to favor Republicans to the jaw dropping series of clips of world class blowhards Bill “Shut up!” O’Reilly and Sean Hannity turning journalism into a joke Outfoxed is a relentless assault on the dishonesty at the core of Murdoch’s failed experiment to control the message....

Small Town Gay Bar is a sometimes sad, sometimes uplifting account of the collective efforts of a few every day small town Americans in red state U.S.A. to create a sense of community for GLBT people where they live. What ultimately resonates from this documentary is that there is something deeply heroic about their efforts to create a safe place for people to live openly where it’s needed most even if it’s just for a few precious hours before last call....

Director Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers) went back to his native Holland to make this stylish and subversive action adventure movie about a WW2-era Jewish spy who lives by her wits as a member of the Dutch resistance as she navigates a treacherous world of sympathetic enemies and dubious allies. As usual with Verhoeven there is a layer of social commentary to Black Book that lies beneath the glossy surface. This is old Hollywood spectacle with depth. Best movie of 2006!...

A modernized take on the sort of old Hollywood ancient Roman epic that updates the sword and sandal genre with plenty of ass kicking spectacle and a powerful central performance from Russell Crowe as a Roman general who seeks vengeance after losing his family at the hands of a corrupt prince and is forced to fight as a gladiator in Rome’s coliseum. The film’s populist hero and themes went over big with audiences turning Crowe into a mega star in the process.

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