Author: Bob Westal

Of all the intellectual pursuits that make some claim to objectivity, none is as complicated and subject to disagreement as economics. The “dismal science” strikes me as accurately named because it seems doomed to eternal controversy. You’re studying the actions of millions of people at once, all making their own buying and selling decisions, all for their own reasons. It’s a task that seems somewhere between massively daunting and downright freaking impossible. Still, economics seeks to be objective and evidence-based. Science-fiction master Isaac Asimov created a fictional science similar to economics, something he called psycho-history, in The Foundation Trilogy. The…

One thing that even relatively short novels often do that movies can have a hard time with is telling the story of a character’s entire life. I’m no expert, but having seen the movie and read the first 60 pages of Mordecai Richler’s 1997 final novel, “Barney’s Version,” I can tell you that Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti) is no David Copperfield and the movie about him is no “Citizen Kane” – or even “The Jolson Story” – but then, what is? An ambitious young man with a penchant for hard liquor, the occasional doobie, and big cigars who flees the…

It’s difficult to talk about Rosamund Pike and not use the word “class.” Yes, she’s a highly educated, elegantly beautiful woman from England, but there’s a lot more to it than that. A versatile actress with a sharp streak of humor, onscreen she exudes self-possession and, when the role allows, a touching dash of sweetness. An experienced stage actress who studied at Oxford, and before that, the intriguingly named Badminton School, Pike faced her first round of worldwide attention back in 2002 as James Bond’s non-Halle Berry sex interest in “Die Another Day.” Numerous other roles followed, including playing the…

Full disclosure: I may not be the ideal reviewer for this particular attempt at raunchy yet sentimental romantic comedy. I have an Ashton Kutcher problem, and I don’t mean like an addiction. Kind of the opposite. Since time immemorial, Hollywood has occasionally smiled upon semi-randomly selected pretty people and I’ve long ago accepted that fact. However, there’s an intense and inescapable smugness about Kutcher that I can’t ignore, and that just makes me want to be anywhere where his image is not. He is, however, not the thing I liked least about “No Strings Attached,” a new comedy conceived to…

It’s a bit of a cheap shot, but it’s true: the most chilling thing about “Season of the Witch” is that its screenplay won the prestigious Nicholl Fellowship in 2003. The universe would make somewhat more sense, however, if I learned that director Dominic Sena and his cohorts destroyed the original screenplay by Bragi Schut without the writer’s cooperation. Call me a stickler, but I don’t think award-winning period horror/thriller screenplays should have 100% earnest medieval knights who generally speak in stilted, old-fashioned sounding English, saying “Shit!” when they’re scared. The best line in the whole film should not be:…

Even for those of us who are now well over 40, it’s a little hard to imagine the power of the curse word before the late 1960s. Though they popped up in British films of the 30s and 40s, even “hell” and “damn” were all but outlawed in mainstream American theaters, with a special exception being made for the final line of “Gone With the Wind.” Stronger language was another matter. Novels by James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence became censorship cause célèbres through the 50s primarily because they contained such words as “fuck” and “c&nt” and used them in an…

Though he’s an Oscar winner with over 118 film and television credits, don’t be too alarmed if you don’t instantly recognize Jim Broadbent’s name. If you ever see movies where people speak in English accents, you know his work. Broadbent won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the 2001 biographical drama, “Iris,” opposite Judi Dench, but he was seen by far more viewers that year as flamboyant MC/manager Harold Zidler in Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” Before that, Broadbent made a gigantic splash as the authoritative dramaturge and master of silly wordplay, W.S. Gilbert, in Mike Leigh’s 1998 historical back-stage musical,…

From “Golden Boy” to the “Rocky” series and “Raging Bull,” families have often played a key role in boxing dramas. “The Fighter,” however, is something else entirely. It’s a black comedy-spiked family drama effectively masquerading as a boxing picture. Set during the 1980s and perhaps the early 90s, this is the fact-based story of real life boxer “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), the pride of the industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts. As the film opens, Micky is the most stable member of a family marked by ignorance, innate jealousies, selfishness, drugs, extremely thick Boston accents and a certain amount of…

It’s not ideal, but Scott Thompson is still best known to a lot of people as “the openly gay one” from The Kids in the Hall, the great Canadian comedy troupe that made pre-Jon Stewart Comedy Central bearable and is, to some of us, the only true television sketch comedy successor to the genius of Monty Python. Like all of the Kids, Thompson is an unusually gifted character comedian, creating memorable grotesques of all genders and sexual preferences, ranging from suburban dads and curmudgeons to Queen Elizabeth II and my personal favorite, violence-prone Italian screen siren Francesca Fiore. Don’t ask…

Being both a little person and African-American, it’s an inescapable for a talented and highly experienced performer like Tony Cox that most roles refers to his stature and, usually, his ethnicity. On the other hand, few actors of any size or pigmentation have managed the kind of indelible, stereotype-busting comic performance he assayed in his best known film, 2003’s “Bad Santa.” Working alongside two absurdly intense comic performers, Billy Bob Thornton and the late Bernie Mac, Tony Cox created a memorable villain in the outspoken and conniving Marcus, getting some of the film’s biggest laughs while frequently playing straight man…