Daniel J. Linehan

Recent Actions

• Posted CinePhillyist Reviews... The Time Traveler's Wife to Phillyist
  So, um, I don't get it. The Time Traveler's Wife is a highly-praised reality-bending romance, beloved both by critics and many of my friends. I've seen people push the book earnestly into somebody else's hands, saying, "Trust me, you'll love it." Sure enough, they would love it, and tell their friends, and so on. Now that said beloved novel has spawned a mopey, over-literal film adaptation, I can ask what I didn't ask then:...
• Posted The Curious Case of Arlen Specter to Phillyist
  Pennsylvania is an increasingly Democratic state. In 2004, Kerry won the state by a hair; Obama won it with a handy ten percent lead. In 2004, twelve of nineteen Keystone Congressmen were Republican, as well as the two Senators. Now, eleven representatives and the junior Senator are Democrats. In 2004, there were roughly 500,000 more Democrats than Republicans in the state; during the extended primary last year, that lead expanded to well over a...
• Posted CinePhillyist Reviews... Ciao to Phillyist
  Ciao, a well-intentioned movie about grief, loneliness, and tentative human connections, is not inherently bad, but it’s an ill-fated compromise between two types of filmmaking that turn out to be mutually incompatible. Much of the movie employs lengthy static shots that employ intentionally blank characters in a service of a deliberate composition, a style that director Yen Tan apparently lifted from many international art-house favorites. A master like Tsai Ming-liang can create a single...
• Posted CinePhillyist Reviews... W. to Phillyist
  Once upon a time, Oliver Stone enjoyed a reputation as the most paranoid man in Hollywood, seeing conspiracy theories under every rock and questioning the official explanations. So when Stone decided, earlier this year, to tackle the subject of our current president, who is responsible for any number of actual conspiracies to take away civil liberties and then cover up his own responsibility for same, I got a little giddy. This is, after all, the...
• Posted CinePhillyist Reviews... Body of Lies to Phillyist
  In the movie Lakeview Terrace, released two weeks ago, Samuel L. Jackson is told by a neighbor that at least housing prices should continue to rise. That line of dialogue, innocuous enough when written, instantly places the movie as a relic of the hazily-remembered golden days of last summer, when subprime mortgages and those who securitized them saw no end in sight. Body of Lies is equally ill-served by the time-lag involved in movie production....