Author Archive
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Toward the end of Tomas Alfredson’s film of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, an elusive double-agent, who’s betrayed British state secrets to the Soviet Union for over 20 years, defends his decision to have done so on aesthetic grounds. And you can hardly blame the bloke, considering the portrait of early-’70s London that [...]
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Thursday, January 19th, 2012
A Dangerous Method
Slavoj Žižek once said that the goal of traditional psychoanalysis was to help patients overcome their internal prohibitions so that life could be freely enjoyed; but that “the problem today is that the commandment of the ruling ideologies is ‘enjoy.’” In other words, society now promotes what it used to require we repress. What happened [...]
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Thursday, January 12th, 2012
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Every yuppie’s uncle has read and raved about Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; but, having been burned by other such business-class classics as Angels and Demons, I couldn’t kick back the inertia enough to get past page five—especially since David Fincher, by directing the Hollywood version, seemed poised to render a time-consuming [...]
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Thursday, December 29th, 2011
The Descendants
The Descendants is an escape to the ordinary. Alexander Payne’s first feature since Sideways is also his second since leaving Nebraska; it proves afresh that you can take the director out of Omaha, but you can’t take Omaha out of the director. At least that’s the message encoded in the opening monologue—one I was happy [...]
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Thursday, December 15th, 2011
Hugo
Big airports have always fascinated me. Thousands of passengers zipline back and forth on any given day: maybe on business, maybe coming home, maybe for a layover—perhaps as a tourist or gadabout. It’s a model U.N., with representatives from every part of the world trying to get to every other, but few transients stop to [...]