Posts tagged Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
MOVIE REVIEW: Sand Castle

Wars transform the soldiers that participate in them.  Men and women in combat can be broken down, built up, or both in positive and negative ways.  Because the young tend to serve, their stories, and the films that tell them, can mirror a late-term version of the “coming-of-age” archetype.  The fingerprints of forced maturity appear all over the likes of “The Deer Hunter,” “Platoon,” “Jarhead,” and dozens of other films.  In all honesty, the trope is overused and over-familiar and that’s the first mistake of “Sand Castle.”

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VIDEO: Post-film reactions to "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk"

Five of the best film critics Chicago has to offer from the Chicago Independent Film Critics Circle may have dodged the high frame rate experiment of Ang Lee's "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," but they still caught the full film. Enjoy the mixed reactions from Leo Brady, Jon Espino, Clint Worthington, Don Shanahan, and Jim Alexander!

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MOVIE REVIEW: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

There are commendable allegories bottled somewhere inside both Ben Fountain’s 2012 award-winning novel and Ang Lee’s adaptation of “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.”  However, knowing what we know now about “paid patriotism” since 2015, those morals, and any patriotic pride the fictional story’s grand setting can muster, have lost too much of their high ground to inspire.  It is difficult to invest in a reflective film wrestling with disillusionment when too many current audiences already enter with the same feelings about the War on Terror.  Disillusionment of disillusionment is a tough sell if the goal is the change minds.

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EDITORIAL: Movies and the 9/11 impact

ANNUAL UPDATE: I'm here for an editorial on the anniversary of 9/11 to showcase a few movies, both serious and not-so-serious, that speak to that day whether as a tribute, remembrance, or example of how life has changed since that fateful day.  Enjoy!

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Column, Editorial, SPECIALDon Shanahan9/11, 9/11 films, 9/11 movies, Films based on 9/11, Movie based on 9/11, Films affected by 9/11, Movies affected by 9/11, 9/11 anniversary, War on Terror, Ghostbusters, Independence Day: Resurgence, Independence Day, The Walk, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Godzilla, Star Trek Into Darkness, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Man of Steel, Olympus Has Fallen, White House Down, Patriots Day, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, Sully, American Sniper, Captain America: The First Avenger, Live Free or Die Hard, We Are Marshall, Hitch, National Treasure, Miracle, Million Dollar Baby, Ladder 49, Elf, Gangs of New York, Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 2, We Were Soldiers, Black Hawk Down, Behind Enemy Lines, The Last Castle, Pearl Harbor, The Patriot, Air Force One, Rambo III, Charlie Wilson's War, Jarhead, Courage Under Fire, V for Vendetta, The Sum of All Fears, Fight Club, Arlington Road, Munich, Syriana, The Dark Knight Rises, The Siege, True Lies, Pushing Tin, Turbulence, Executive Decision, Passenger 57, Airplane!, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, Watchmen, Deep Impact, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, King Kong, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Superman, Boyhood, The Fifth Estate, Snowden, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Source Code, Bridesmaids, Iron Man, Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo, Snakes on a Plane, Soul Plane, Anger Management, The Terminal, An Inconvenient Truth, Fahrenheit 9/11, 25th Hour, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, 13 Hours, Good Kill, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, A Most Wanted Man, Lone Survivor, Zero Dark Thirty, Act of Valor, Restrepo, Green Zone, Dear John, The Lucky One, Brothers, Taking Chance, The Messenger, Stop-Loss, Body of Lies, In the Valley of Elah, Lions of Lambs, The Kingdom, Rendition, Grace is Gone, The Hurt Locker, Home of the Brave, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Remember Me, Reign Over Me, World Trade Center, United 93, Big Trouble, The Time Machine, Serendipity, Zoolander, Men in Black II, Sidewalks of New York, City by the Sea, Collateral Damage, The Glass House, Hardball, Rock Star, Soul Survivors, The Musketeer, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Ocean's 11, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, New York, New York City, The Pentagon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Editorial, War movies, film commentary, movie commentary, social commentary, SPECIAL, ANNUAL, Donald Shanahan, Don Shanahan, Every Movie Has a LessonComment
EDITORIAL: 17 films to watch for the 2017 Oscars

On this day after the Oscars, we must already call those 2015 films old news and look towards next year's contenders.  Plenty of movies will hit theaters in 2016, but only the best become Oscar hopefuls.  Set your sights on these 17 films for the 2017 Oscars.  Keep in mind that release dates and even titles of some of these unfinished films could still change.  Surprises come all the time, but this what the crystal ball is showing for the 89th Academy Awards.  

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