Chicago Daily Observer

I always figured that when I got older God would come into my life. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him, I’d have the same opinion of me that he does. — Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), ten minutes before the end of No Country for Old Men

Sheriff Bell’s dark ruminations amount to a closing deduction supported by two hours of onscreen mayhem and gloom, but if someone said these things to me, I would offer the following remarks. If God has never come into your life, how can you possibly know what his opinion of you might be? And if you experience him only as an absence he’s definitely part of your life, because he’s in your thoughts—even if your thoughts are untested, gut level assumptions. No Country for Old men is a grim, lumbering tale loaded with precisely the same ... Read More...

Damn! Prehistoric people had better dental plans than we do!
— Viewer’s comment on 10,000 B.C.

10,000 B.C.! Savage, nomadic hunters packing hefty bludgeons, beating each other senseless, and hauling choleric females around by their hair; eight-year-old boys itching to exit their caves and kill a few wild animals for lunch: these are the kinds of things I’d expected to remember about director Roland Emmerich’s Stone Age spectacle. I wanted to leave the theater happy—and grateful—to be living in an age of frozen entrées, instant coffee, and daytime television.
Tough luck, Roquemore. After the movie I drove home thoroughly disappointed, reeling from a relentless barrage of sheer malarkey, and asking myself—again and again—a single question: how on earth could a film humming with perilous hunting expeditions, tough as nails cavemen, and snarling saber toothed tigers be dead on arrival, unintentionally funny, and tedious? In spots, 10,000 B.C. makes ... Read More...

I don’t see God within a million miles of this. On the
other hand, if you slept with me I could change my
mind in a hurry.
— Philip Seymour Hoffman to Julia Roberts, Charlie
Wilson’s War

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
— Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldiers”

Well into director Mike Nichols’ lubricious, high octane film on American covert action operations during Soviet Russia’s conflict in Afghanistan—widely considered the final battle of the Cold War—U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) asks Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) to “dial down the religion [and] stop tryin’ to convert everyone to Christianity.” Throughout the movie, Herring’s Protestant faith seems anomalous—a curious, unfashionable ... Read More...