Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Alice in Wonderland
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 been aged to the brink […]
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Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Shutter Island
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 a blitzkrieg in my brain. […]
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Monday, February 15th, 2010
The Wolfman
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 indulge in just a little […]
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Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Avatar
It seems a faux pas to review Avatar from any spiritual age older than 12. If my prepubescent self could be roused for comment, he’d probably say, “Gee whiz, those 3-D blue-cat people are totally rad!” But as a (slightly) older person, who views excessive promotion in the same way that that 12-year-old viewed cooties, […]
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Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are
A few months ago, a conservative politician callously derided a liberal bill, claiming that its “empathy” was just a slippery slope to partisanship. One does not need to be partisan—or even political—to realize that empathy is the last bastion of civilized thought. If empathy becomes a “partisan” issue, rather than something generally recognized for its […]