http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies Just another kitsch-ka-blogs weblog Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:39:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/11/17/synecdoche-new-york/ 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 ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/11/08/martyrs/ “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 ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/10/24/nick-and-norahs-infinite-playlist/ 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? ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/10/06/burn-after-reading/ 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 ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/09/28/vicky-cristina-barcelona/ 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 ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/09/14/the-dark-knight/ 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 ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/04/15/be-kind-rewind/ 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 ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/03/09/time-to-turn-the-page-a-reaction-to-%e2%80%9cdiablo-cody-backlash-in-full-swing%e2%80%9d/ [Now that No Country for Old Men is last year’s Best Picture, I felt I should post the review I wrote way back in pre-Oscar times. Warning, there’s a spoiler.] Until the end credits, there isn’t one bar of music in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. In fact, ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/03/03/no-country-for-old-men/ Persepolis may be a landmark: the first ever feature-length animated autobiography. Based on graphic novels by Iranian-born Marjane Satrapi, this Franco-American production (which Satrapi co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud) is international in scope, often enjoyable and perhaps even “truthful,” but limited in a way that is so fundamental that I could ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/02/26/persepolis/