Archive for February, 2010
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Shutter Island
The style and manner of Shutter Island seems to leave the viewer with one of three reactions: a.) Exhaustion; b.) Elation; c.) Martin Scorsese, W.T.F.?! (The third option, admittedly, is not incompatible with the first two.) Where do I fall? Well, when I left the theater, neurons were firing like a blitzkrieg in my brain. […]
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Crazy Heart
According to Bad Blake, the fading country-and-Western star in Crazy Heart, a song is good if you think you’ve heard it before when you listen to it the first time. This philosophy seems to be shared by Scott Cooper, who wrote, produced, and directed this adaptation of Thomas Cobb’s novel. It’s less an aesthetic principle […]
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Monday, February 15th, 2010
The Wolfman
If the hair on my knuckles spiked, the muscles in my back contorted, and I let out a bloodcurdling howl during The Wolfman, it was probably just a yawn. Maybe my failure of intuition—and unwarranted heeding of publicity—had left me crabby. But shouldn’t the remake of a 1941 monster-movie classic indulge in just a little […]
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Thursday, February 11th, 2010
A Single Man
In A Single Man, fantasy and reality blend—with more concord than the filmmakers perhaps intended. We’re once again in the An Education period—1962—though, this time, the British protagonist has swum across the pond, and then some, to Santa Monica. George (Colin Firth), a middle-aged professor of English, has only recently become single; his partner of […]
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Thursday, February 4th, 2010
The Messenger
Watching The Messenger, I felt as if I was moderating a group-therapy circle—a support group for veterans whose lives have been torn asunder. There seems to be something movie-ish withheld from this movie; the plot is scaled-back and purposeful: it has ends to meet. But its self-abnegation seems like a sacrifice to higher values; the […]