Author Archive
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
Contagion
Right before the lights went down and Contagion got underway, my buddy asked if this was a bad movie for us to be sharing popcorn at; and for the first few minutes, my answer was a withering “Uh-huh….” Steven Soderbergh lingers a few extra seconds on a much-fingered bowl of peanuts at a bar in [...]
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Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Even if I didn’t expect it, I should have: Our hirsute cousins are more compelling, and, generally speaking, more convincingly embodied than we are in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I should’ve also anticipated its tendentious way of getting from Point A to Point Ape. An hour and a half waiting period between [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
Our Idiot Brother
Was it Charles Schulz who said that happiness is a fuzzy sweater? In the opening scene of Our Idiot Brother, set at a farmer’s market either in the thick of autumn or the clammy armpit of spring, Ned (Paul Rudd) wears a woolly Huxtable hand-me-down like his second skin—third, if you count the tie-dyed shirt [...]
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Thursday, August 25th, 2011
The Help
Pauline Kael wrote that the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, produced in 1962 and set in Alabama during the 1930s, was in “part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.” And now we have The Help, based on a 2009 best-seller set in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962, “honoring white viewers for not being [...]
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Thursday, August 11th, 2011
Crazy, Stupid, Love
If you can accept the pretense that Steve Carell would be married to Julianne Moore; that law-student Emma Stone is pre-engaged to Josh Groban (pretty awesome casting, actually); that Moore would cheat on Carell with Kevin Bacon; that that dissolves their marriage; that said marriage would produce a mind-numbingly precocious son, that species of old-soul [...]