Archive for March, 2010
Monday, March 29th, 2010
Hot Tub Time Machine
I wish John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke could go back in time and salvage the title Hot Tub Time Machine. The movie doesn’t live up to it. Their Wellsian jacuzzi takes them to 1986—not even far enough to prevent this from being a rip-off of Back to the Future, which came [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
The Ghost Writer
In The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s chilly new thriller, rain clouds converge over Martha’s Vineyard in the way that sunlight loomed over L.A. in Chinatown. Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, has fallen from grace and retreated into writing his memoirs; but the initial ghostwriter has drowned, and his vacancy [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans
I can’t help but feel that, given the right circumstances, even the most sophisticated among us can devolve into reality-show contestants. When it was reported that Werner Herzog was making a movie based on Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), the latter basically said, “Oh no you di’-in’t,” and the former retorted, “I ain’t here to [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton’s misadventures in Wonderland are woefully miscalculated. Unlike Alice, who chased her dream down the rabbit-hole, the director seems to have stumbled into it. His Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a hole in the screen—an A-hole, to be precise. In this conception of Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century whimsies, the ingenue has been aged to the brink [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
And the Winner for the Best Picture of 2009 is . . .
Paid, as I am, merely by my satisfaction in writing and yours in reading, I don’t fritter my hours away compiling the best-of lists that the pros—much to us amateurs’ collective pleasure—slave away at, or the sort of star-studded, red-carpet reportage that asks the celebutantes who they’re wearing. (Those queries make me wish that Buffalo [...]