Archive for October, 2009
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Capitalism: A Love Story
Michael Moore may have a big mouth, but is it large enough to chew off capitalism? In his new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, he remarks about how difficult the concept is to define; but if we can’t even define the problem, how can we solve it? I think Moore is ambivalent not about the [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are
A few months ago, a conservative politician callously derided a liberal bill, claiming that its “empathy” was just a slippery slope to partisanship. One does not need to be partisan—or even political—to realize that empathy is the last bastion of civilized thought. If empathy becomes a “partisan” issue, rather than something generally recognized for its [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
Taking Woodstock
Woodstock is as long ago to us as the Stock Market Crash was to the concert—and Taking Woodstock makes 1969 feel like the ancient past. But maybe that’s because, somehow, it manages to make the peace-love-and-rock’n’roll orgasm of the century boring. One character says of the concert’s promoter, Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff)—a becalmed flower-child smoothie [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Cold Souls
Cold Souls is a diaphanous nocturne—a little metaphysical flower lilting in the gray autumnal light. Paul Giamatti plays himself or, rather, the person we might infer Paul Giamatti to be, given the schlub-everyman he incarnated in American Splendor and Sideways. He’s playing in Chekhov on Broadway, but can’t get out of his own head and [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
The Informant!
Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! may be an ingenious filmic experiment—a cinematic trompe l’oeil. It’s a modern retooling of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), with the schizoid circus-freak somnambulist wearing a white collar and a Middle American cornfed grin. Caligari, which explained away its zig-zagging Expressionism by putting the camera behind the eyes of a [...]