http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies Just another kitsch-ka-blogs weblog Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:47:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Tim Burton’s misadventures in Wonderland are woefully miscalculated. Unlike Alice, who chased her dream down the rabbit-hole, the director seems to have stumbled into it. His Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a hole in the screen—an A-hole, to be precise. In this conception of Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century whimsies, the ingenue has ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/03/11/alice-in-wonderland/ Paid, as I am, merely by my satisfaction in writing and yours in reading, I don’t fritter my hours away compiling the best-of lists that the pros—much to us amateurs’ collective pleasure—slave away at, or the sort of star-studded, red-carpet reportage that asks the celebutantes who they’re wearing. (Those queries ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/03/04/and-the-winner-for-the-best-picture-of-2009-is/ The style and manner of Shutter Island seems to leave the viewer with one of three reactions: a.) Exhaustion; b.) Elation; c.) Martin Scorsese, W.T.F.?! (The third option, admittedly, is not incompatible with the first two.) Where do I fall? Well, when I left the theater, neurons were firing like ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/02/25/shutter-island/ According to Bad Blake, the fading country-and-Western star in Crazy Heart, a song is good if you think you’ve heard it before when you listen to it the first time. This philosophy seems to be shared by Scott Cooper, who wrote, produced, and directed this adaptation of Thomas Cobb’s novel. ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/02/18/crazy-heart/ If the hair on my knuckles spiked, the muscles in my back contorted, and I let out a bloodcurdling howl during The Wolfman, it was probably just a yawn. Maybe my failure of intuition—and unwarranted heeding of publicity—had left me crabby. But shouldn’t the remake of a 1941 monster-movie classic ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/02/15/the-wolfman/ In A Single Man, fantasy and reality blend—with more concord than the filmmakers perhaps intended. We’re once again in the An Education period—1962—though, this time, the British protagonist has swum across the pond, and then some, to Santa Monica. George (Colin Firth), a middle-aged professor of English, has only recently ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/02/11/a-single-man/ Watching The Messenger, I felt as if I was moderating a group-therapy circle—a support group for veterans whose lives have been torn asunder. There seems to be something movie-ish withheld from this movie; the plot is scaled-back and purposeful: it has ends to meet. But its self-abnegation seems like a ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/02/04/the-messenger/ Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces is an attempt at film noir; it comes off as film rose. The movie has all the elements that Americans have come to expect from romantic European exports—it’s leisurely, uninhibited, sophisticated, pretty. But Almodóvar tries to jam the appurtenances of old-school American pulp on to the ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/01/28/broken-embraces/ In Daybreakers, vampires are truly mainstream. They make up the bulk of the population, and have for 10 years. Humans who haven’t assimilated to this change in demographics hang on meat hooks; the vampires mine their veins, and squirt the blood into their morning coffee. (This is a clever touch, ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/01/21/daybreakers/ I slipped into a 6:40 show of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at 6:50, hoping to have only missed some previews; instead, I apparently missed out on half the plot. Unless the director, Terry Gilliam, has devised a newfangled approach to storytelling that condenses an hour or more of exposition ... http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2010/01/14/the-imaginarium-of-doctor-parnassus/