Things to do on campus and in the city in December after finals have ended and boredom sets in.
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Welcome to the official, independent student-run newspaper of Hofstra University!
Welcome to the official, independent student-run newspaper of Hofstra University!
All in Movies
Things to do on campus and in the city in December after finals have ended and boredom sets in.
Review of the impressive acting and beautiful storyline in the new Scorsese film "Hugo"
Movie review of the magic and nostalgia of the beloved Jim Henson creation - the muppets.
Comedy movie Tower Heist with all star cast of Ben /still, Eddie Murphy, and Matthew Broderick.
Behind the scenes look at punk rock legends being fathers.
Review of the new remake of the classic movie Footloose is less than well received.
There are so many Hollywood darlings in Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion" I was half expecting all the story lines to neatly tie in together in the end. But it isn't that kind of feel-good movie. Rather, it's a serious dose of "I don't feel so good." And for those who catch the fictitious virus, the story's bad guy, there's a one in four chance they make it out alive.
Music
Joyce Manor - Joyce Manor
Make no mistake, this California four piece plays pop punk, but only in the loosest sense. Don't expect any influences from Green Day and Screeching Weasel, or any similarities with contemporaries The Dopamines either. Joyce Manor is about urgency, energy and a fair dose of abrasion, editing their song structures down to the noisiest minimum requirements of a pop tune. Heartfelt lyrics and everyman vocals will have you singing along to this self-titled full length, and their deceptively strong musicianship will keep you coming back for more.
Shabazz Palaces - Black Up
Ishmael Butler AKA Butterfly was a hot commodity of alternative hip hop in the 90's as a result of his de facto leadership role in Digable Planets. Since that group succumbed to infighting, Butler has kept busy: his solo effort under the masthead of Shabazz Palaces lifts the spirit of his work in Digable Planets and recontextualizes it in shocking and innovative ways. Jazz samples have been replaced by a cosmic and atonal sound palette which Butler pains with deftly. Black Up is spacey, obtuse, idiosyncratic, and easily the best hip hop release this summer. Chew on that, Lil' Wayne.
Bomb the Music Industry! - Vacation
There are benefits and drawbacks to following a band through their career. On the one hand, you feel a part of something—you are the audience. You're invested; on the other hand, any band is liable to take a sharp turn, inevitably flinging some fans to the wayside. On Vacations, BTMI finally take that turn, sloughing off most of their ska influences and embracing garage rock and their healthy appreciation for the Beach Boys. Lyrically it may be their best record yet, and although it requires some acclimation from long-time fans, Vacations may well be their magnum opus.
Much like last year's Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun began as one of the fake trailers in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse (if you have no recollection of it, that's because it was almost exclusively shown in Canadian releases). In the vein of those films, Hobo is a movie keenly aware of itself and its limitations. Each beat of Hobo—the hambone villains, needlessly lewd and corny script, amateurishly oversaturated color and blood enough to drown a small army—rings true as an homage to the exploitation and B-movies of its heritage.
On Tuesday night the Hofstra Film Club provided a screening of the film If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, as well as a Q&A with the director. If A Tree Falls tells the story of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a radical faction of the environmentalist movement, alongside the personal story of Daniel McGowan, an ELF member brought to trial for eco-terrorism.
What's most shocking about Hanna isn't its opening scene of the titular 16-year old, hunting and disemboweling a deer in the wilderness of Finland. Nor is it the penultimate sequence, wherein Erik Heller (Eric Bana) forces a rusted steel girder through his adversary's ribcage. The truly amazing thing about this film is that its life began as the senior film project of Seth Lochhead, a student of the Vancouver Film School.
Source Code is essentially two related movies. The first asks the question: If Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a helicopter pilot for the American army in Afghanistan, how did he end up in a metallic pod, obeying the orders of strangers via computer screens? The second seeks to stop a domestic terrorist from detonating a nuclear device in downtown Chicago. Mystery plots make
The countless filmmaking errors committed by Battle: Los Angeles make it difficult to choose which is the most salient.
It would be easy to criticize the characterization, or near absence of it; this movie doesn't sculpt real people. Instead, it does one of two things: 1) relies on a series of war-themed tropes (male feelings thinly veiled beneath machismo, a soldier speaking by an unknown gravestone before shipping out; the loner gadfly who questions orders) to give the audience an idea of a person, and 2) includes extra bodies in a scene for the sole purpose of receiving bullets.