Author Archive
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
Frost/Nixon
In 1977, Richard Nixon agreed to his first televised interview since his resignation. It was granted not to an American journalist, but to an English talk-show host, David Frost. The erudite ex-president, desperate to improve his tarnished record for posterity, perceived that the inexperienced Frost would be a pushover; he thought he could chew through […]
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Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Quantum of Solace
Quantum of Solace is a schizoid movie. There’s a definite tension between the material and the intentions of the filmmakers—should the hero be Bond or badass? The question is never resolved, but one needn’t care; the movie was thoroughly enjoyable. Quantum is saved by its odd combination of professionalism and incompetence.
This is the first actual […]
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Monday, November 17th, 2008
Synecdoche, New York
Watching Synecdoche, New York is like catching up with an old friend whose company you enjoy, but who—slowly but surely—starts to monopolize your time. You know that his blathering is a tic he can’t control, so you don’t want to push him away; alas, you feel compelled to check your watch and marvel, “My! Look […]
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Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Martyrs
Seeing the new French horror film Martyrs is like going trick-or-treating and ending up with a frayed philosophy text in your pillowcase. The writer-director, Pascal Laugier, has modernized the biblical story of Job—who lost everything, except his faith in God—by giving it the grindhouse treatment, grafting on the carnage of cheapo slashers. His heroine is […]
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Friday, October 24th, 2008
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
“I don’t really subscribe to any label,” says Nick (Michael Cera) in advertisements for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. How cute. But would he agree that the label “high school movie” doesn’t apply to this film because its teenage lovebirds spend dusk-till-dawn looking to consummate their love—and thus their “adulthood”—at an indie-rock concert rather than […]
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Monday, October 6th, 2008
Burn After Reading
In No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers declaimed that the sky was falling, and used allegorical constructs to bolster their assertion. In their new film, Burn After Reading, they’re dealing with human characters, and look upon the sinking sky with a shrug, as if to say: “Who cares? It’s just caving in on […]
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Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
From the way most American films perceive Southwestern Europeans, one might think that the Old World has graduated past employment. All its inhabitants are retirees with nothing better to do than paint, write poetry, and—mais oui!—make dirty, dirty, sexy love. This atmosphere of leisure is about the opposite of the low-pressure system that perpetually hovers […]
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Sunday, September 14th, 2008
The Dark Knight
The word “Batman” is omitted from the title of The Dark Knight for good reason: He’s hardly in it. His screen time pales in comparison to his adversary’s—maybe not in terms of minutes, but certainly in memorableness. To fend off comparisons to Jack Nicholson, director Christopher Nolan pulled a wild card for his Joker: the […]
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Be Kind Rewind
Be Kind Rewind is nothing but a trifle: a sweet, technically crude little comedy. It’s of note only because it is so terribly put together, and yet the work of an artist whose reputation is based on technical sophistication. Writer-director Michel Gondry’s experimental techniques beautifully served Charlie Kaufman’s unorthodox screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the […]
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Sunday, March 9th, 2008
Time to Turn the Page: A Reaction to “Diablo Cody Backlash in Full Swing”
I’m glad people are finally hip to the program—Juno’s Academy Award-winning “legitimacy” only further drags scriptwriter Diablo Cody’s reputation into the brackish puddle of square mud. (I won’t say that I said it first, Slate and Gawker, even though I pretty much did.) Attacking Cody, as the Gawker article, “Diablo Cody Backlash in Full Swing,” […]