Email Author Rob Nelson

Awards

• 2008 - Page One Contest/Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists, published July 4, 2007

  "L.A. Plays Itself"

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2007 Stories by Rob Nelson

• The Bothersome Man

  published August 14, 2007

  Evidently, Norwegians can take a joke, as this deadpan satire of the nation's humorless affect grossed big in its homeland after bowing last... More >>

• Surge This

  published July 17, 2007

  Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled... More >>

• Save Darfur?

  published July 17, 2007

  For an issue-oriented doc with activist aims, the line between hope and despair— between placating an outraged audience and calling it to... More >>

• Analog Hero for the Digital Age

  published June 19, 2007

  Still an all-American bloodhound after all these years, Bruce Willis's Det. John McClane begins Live Free or Die Hard sniffing around a... More >>

• The Zeitgeist Made 'Em Do It

  published June 5, 2007

  Speaking on behalf of a decent society, a recent IMDB message-poster sketched the basic terms of the so-called torture-porn debate in his... More >>

• Fido

  published June 5, 2007

  You think they're dead, these zombie-film parodies, but, one after another, they keep lumbering back. Not much brain activity, alas, in this... More >>

• Cannes and Abel

  published May 22, 2007

  "Whaddya love about it so much?" Abel Ferrara—director of the strip-club-set Go Go Tales, my favorite film at Cannes—is... More >>

• Pow! Right in the Kisser

  published May 22, 2007

  A true-crime yarn told largely by the criminal, with supporting testimony from his curiously forgiving victim, Crazy Love comes billed as... More >>

• Savage Love

  published May 15, 2007

  The Cannes Film Festival is chiefly revered as a showcase for prolific, careerist auteurs, so the appearance of Savage Grace, the first... More >>

• Kon's Cure for Cinema

  published May 15, 2007

  Dreams and the Internet, according to the psychotherapist superheroine of Satoshi Kon's loopy Paprika, are "areas where the repressed... More >>

• JitterBug

  published May 15, 2007

  The most volatile, least easily psychoanalyzed of '70s auteurs in Peter Biskind's classic New Hollywood tell-all Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,... More >>

• Shooting to Kill

  published April 24, 2007

  A self-described "anarchist" and proto-YouTuber, a khaki-clad confidant of the Weather Underground and a buddy to New York modernists from Warhol... More >>

• Southern Comforts

  published April 10, 2007

  Durham, North Carolina— Southern hospitality can't fully account for the warm vibe at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a... More >>

• Here, Mike! Sit! Good Boy!

  published April 3, 2007

  Speaking as the owner of a new puppy, I can say definitively that a dog is both more and less annoying than the average person. Year of the... More >>

• 'Whole New Thing'

  published March 27, 2007

  Half-new at most, this Running With Scissors–type tale of a precocious, effeminate teen who gets hot for teacher while prepping for a... More >>

• Wedding Crashers

  published March 20, 2007

  A reformist disciple of Dogme, that earth- and camcorder-shaking movement wherein waves are broken and celebration is cause for alarm, Danish... More >>

• 'Air Guitar Nation'

  published March 13, 2007

  My long strums are pretty fucking tight," gushes one faux-ax-stroker in this slick, hilarious, and at times even suspenseful ode to competitive... More >>

• Bob Shaye's New Line

  published March 13, 2007

  Hardcore phantasie geeks will relish role-playing every enemy of The Last Mimzy, a family-style sci-fi adventure whose director, Bob Shaye,... More >>

• Attention Starved

  published March 6, 2007

  Desperation, onscreen and off, has been a key element of reality TV from the beginning, and no wonder. Whether it's seven strangers in a dorm-like... More >>

• Getting Off

  published February 27, 2007

  Anyone who doubts that moviemaking is an essentially masturbatory endeavor would do well to come— preferably alone—to Jean-Claude... More >>

• Hussy 'N' Flow

  published February 20, 2007

  It may be hard out there for a pimp, but it ain't too hard for a writer-director to make a movie whose marketing hinges on the lurid spectacle of... More >>

• Girl Power

  published February 20, 2007

  Released in the U.S. less than three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the most esteemed movie by the best-known filmmaker that mainland... More >>

• 'Norbit'

  published February 6, 2007

  Two Nutty Professor movies and Eddie Murphy still hasn't gotten the split- personality shtick out of his system. Original nut Jerry Lewis... More >>

• Dissent for Sale

  published January 23, 2007

  Park City, Utah— Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance docs Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the... More >>

• Sympathy for the Devil

  published January 16, 2007

  Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore's... More >>