Rucy Cui

NEWS 2/22/12 6:00pm

'Safe House' plays it safe

By Rucy Cui

Safe House is an action movie that draws heavily on the exemplar of its genre, The Bourne Trilogy. Director Daniel Espinosa (Easy Money) alternates between tight, seamlessly choreographed fight scenes and roiling crowds of extras in a way that should be familiar to audiences. He seems to be ticking off a list of CIA action-film requirements: Car chases? Check. Shaky camerawork? Check. Badass spy gone rogue? Check. Pretty female love interest for one of the main characters? Check. Espinosa even made the executive decision to hire Richard Pearson, film editor of The Bourne Supremacy, and Oliver Wood, cinematographer of all three Bourne movies. There's an awful lot of emulation going on, but without the foundation of a good, well-written script, Safe House … plays it safe.

NEWS 1/25/12 6:00pm

Predictable plot leaves 'Divide' hopeless

By Rucy Cui

With a tagline as bleakly ominous as "The lucky ones died in the blast," The Divide is the kind of movie you go into expecting the worst because you already recognize its plot twists from a mile away. Like most in the post-apocalyptic survival horror genre, the film fetishizes humanity's actual inhumanity in the face of a hugely cataclysmic event. Director Xavier Gens (whose body of work also includes the brutally gruesome Frontier(s)) is the clever man who shows us the wickedness of the human race. He unflinchingly chronicles the worst of human depravity — ranging from murder to rape to psychosexual torture — with a sort of bullheadedness that taunts the audience by asking, "See? I told you we were irredeemable, didn't I?" The Divide offers nothing groundbreaking, but the capacity for evil in this movie, although dramatized, is plausible enough for quite a few chills.

NEWS 4/14/11 7:00pm

somewhere never travelled disappoints

By Rucy Cui

 

NEWS 4/14/11 7:00pm

Running Water takes festival by storm

By Rucy Cui

 

NEWS 3/17/11 7:00pm

$6 million Turrell Skyspace to be constructed

By Rucy Cui

Students approaching the Shepherd School of Music from the east will soon have a new view. The Suzanne Deal Booth Pavilion and James Turrell Skyspace is a pyramid-shaped structure that will begin construction in front of the east entrance of the Shepherd School on April 4.

NEWS 2/3/11 6:00pm

Ambassador speaks on Turkey

By Rucy Cui

On Friday night, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy hosted a program with His Excellency Namik Tan, ambassador of the Republic of Turkey to the United States, who spoke on Turkey's importance as a mediator in the Middle East and a partner with Western powers. "Turkey is not going anywhere," Tan said. "It is - and will long be - a reliable bridge that binds the civilizations and cultures of the East and West as well as the North and South."