Archive for September, 2010

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Air Doll

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll has a completely foreign sensibility. It’s not American, and it’s not one I’d take immediately for Japanese. We see Hideo (Itsuji Itao, who looks like a pooped-out Mathieu Amalric) press his face against the glass of a commuter train window; the raindrops on the windowpane are a barrier between him and [...]

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Thursday, September 9th, 2010

The American

With a frosty beard, George Clooney looks like Sean Connery. In sunglasses, he resembles my dad. (Weird, right?) But, in The American—scripted by Rowan Joffe from a Martin Booth novel, and directed by Anton Corbijn—he’s playing Steve McQueen. They may as well have cast McQueen, too—and made the movie while he was alive. It’s a [...]

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Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

The Last Exorcism

In nervous times, such as our own, the rationale behind exorcism may seem a relief. It bolsters the iffy notion that internal evil is an external force—one which can be removed by the religious equivalent of a trained exterminator. There’s also a grain of masochistic chic hidden in there, the same congenital backwardness that once [...]

3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott