Author Archive
Thursday, December 8th, 2011
The Artist
People speak of The Artist as if its being a black-and-white silent film were a liability. As if the Weinsteins were taking a risk tantamount to installing hand cranks in the whole bevy of new Beamers. But that assumes that The Artist is an audacious work of art, and not the screen equivalent of the [...]
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Thursday, December 1st, 2011
The Muppets
It’s easy to get a Jim Henson contact high from watching The Muppets—even if, as Dana Stevens eloquently puts it, it’s just as easy to “kvetch and cavil about the details” like Statler and Waldorf, the ever-senescent season-ticket holders counted on to lob verbal tomatoes from the balcony. We begin the journey in Smalltown, U.S.A., [...]
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Thursday, November 17th, 2011
Melancholia
One of the hallmarks of a depressed mind is what Travis Bickle called “morbid self-attention.” Perhaps that explains why the depressed mind behind Melancholia—the film that Lars von Trier was supposedly trying to promote during his foot-in-mouth outbreak at Cannes this year—is so acute at describing the condition, as well as the delusions that always [...]
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Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
The Rum Diary
Maybe the consensus is correct: Maybe The Rum Diary should’ve been called The Rum Diarrhea. Without tipping the scale from mildly clever to insouciantly crass, the film’s narrative sense is slushy—as if all involved were taking their orders from Captain Morgan, rather than screenwriter-director Bruce Robinson—and, yes, I dare say, it gets runny. But some [...]
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Thursday, October 27th, 2011
Tabloid
The confessional documentary is as morally gray as a tabloid and as potentially colorless as a broadsheet. If a subject is made to play the fool, whose fault is it? Are they marionettes or the scene-stealing stars of their own one-man shows? Embedded in those answers is our permission to exercise an alienable right that [...]