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Begging the Question: a review of The Sunset Limited by R. Greg Grooms
“To be, or not to be, that is the question...” Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.
I admit it: Cormac McCarthy fascinates me. In the seven years since I stumbled across No Country For Old Men in an airport bookstore, I’ve savored every morsel of his writing, including his ten novels, two plays, and one screenplay. Three of his novels – All the Pretty Horses, No Country, and The Road—have made it to the screen so far, and both of his plays, albeit only on TV. Last year’s HBO production of his play The Sunset Limited is the subject of this review.
There are but two characters in TSL: Black, a poorly educated ex-con, played by Samuel L. Jackson, and White, a university professor played by Tommy Lee Jones. The play begins just after Black rescued White, who tried to commit suicide by throwing himself in front of a commuter train. Black takes White home to his shabby apartment, and the two spend the next hour and a half debating the meaning of life.

The Tree of Life
review by R. Greg Grooms

A Picture in Need of Words: a review of The Tree of Life

Remember the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words?” It’s not true. Take Terrence Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life, for example.

If you know him at all, it’s probably as the director of one or another of the five feature-length films he’s made over the last 40 years: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and this year’s The Tree of Life. But it would be misleading to describe him as just a film director. He is a Philosopher-Who-Makes-Movies, and they are rare and wonderful creatures indeed. Malick cut his philosophical teeth as an undergrad at Harvard, then did most of the work necessary for a PhD in the subject at Oxford, but left without the degree after a disagreement with a professor about the writings of the 20^th century Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Yes, I hear you: you don’t know who Wittgenstein was, you don’t care, and what does this have to do with the movie, anyway? Patience, please.

A Serious Man (Coen Brothers, 2009)
BY: R. Greg Grooms
Laughing with the Devil: a review of A Serious Man by R. Greg Grooms

The devils laughs because God’s world seems senseless to him; the angel laughs with joy because everything in God’s world has its meaning. [Milan Kundera]

Humor is a funny thing. A comedian tells two jokes; he invests each with all his skill, experience, and timing. One gets a laugh, the other falls flat. Why?

Joel and Ethan Coen have been telling us jokes cinematically for years, and I’ve laughed at them all from Fargo to O Brother, Where art Thou? But their latest attempt—A Serious Man—fell flat with me, and I’ve been wondering why. It’s a typical Coen brothers film with great camera work, crisp editing, and extraordinary casting. All the elements of good humor are there, so why am I not laughing?

A Story that Needs to be Told: a review of Get Low by R Greg Grooms

I love good stories. Sitting in a rocking chair on my grandmother’s front porch on a hot Alabama summer night, listening to my father and his brothers laugh about boyhood egg-stealing; cold November evenings in northern Minnesota while the Block kids recall the bringing-the-horse-in-the-house tale; Edith Schaeffer, dropping names and recounting miracles high in the Swiss Alps: it doesn’t get any better than this.

In my opinion Get Low tells a very good story. My delight in it is, no doubt, due in part to the fact that Chris Provenzano’s screenplay is as essentially southern a tale as the ones I used to hear on my grandmother’s front porch. The personalities, events, music, the look and feel of it are as familiar to me as my Dad’s stories of his childhood. I know these people. Indeed I wonder how many of them I may be related to. For me watching Get Low felt like a visit home. Of course, these qualities that endeared it to me may distance it from others.

The New York Times review of Get Low, while quite complimentary on the whole, couldn’t resist this jab: “Get Low is, in the end, not quite believable.” Not believable? You need to spend a little time south of Manhattan.

The Social Network; a review by R Greg Grooms
At the end of their 1979 ode-to-nihilism, The Wall,
Pink Floyd, after dismissing most of the things we turn to for
comfort—school, work, love, sex, politics—as “just another brick in the
wall,” gave themselves an out in the album’s last cut, “Outside the
Wall”:

All alone, or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall
Some hand in hand
Some gathering together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists
Make their stand
And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall after all it's not easy
banging your heart against some mad bugger’s
Wall

Yes,
I’m afraid even mainstream nihilists cannot be trusted; they need
something to live for as much as the rest of us do. And what better
refuge from the pointlessness of it all than humanity itself? Whatever
else may happen to disappoint you, there will always be someone to love
you, someone you can trust, someone to rely on.
Or will there be?

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