Thursday, August 27th, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
Quinten Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds is about as accurate to the Second World War as Kill Bill was to the present day, and while watching the movie I bought the conceit because this is Tarantino territory, and I was entertained. But, in retrospect, his revisionist history is offensive not so much because it’s dreadfully arrogant of [...]
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Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
The Class
Taking into account its extremely confined setting, The Class is one of the most comprehensive movies I’ve seen. Nearly all of the film—which won the 2008 Palme d’Or at Cannes—is set within a secondary school in a Paris banlieue, and a majority of our time there is devoted to the French class instructed by M. [...]
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
Slumdog Millionaire works for reasons that it shouldn’t; what works in it and what’s wrong with it seem inseparable. For the first two-thirds of the movie, one almost doesn’t expect that it will work at all, but the director, Danny Boyle, and the screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy (who adapted Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A), pull us through. [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Friday, October 24th, 2008
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
“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 an indie-rock concert rather than [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Persepolis
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 not assent to the “magic” [...]