Thursday, October 6th, 2011
Moneyball
Moneyball is straight-backed popular art: a folk-hero biopic with a vision as bright and clear as one of Derek Jeter’s urine samples. It’s a year (2001-2) in the life of a crazily American “genius,” Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who, as the real-life general manager of the Oakland Athletics, was the first person to put Bill [...]
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Thursday, July 14th, 2011
The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s movies are often called “magical,” and that’s typically not applied in the pejorative; but his sway has elements that Lord Voldemort, his unlikely box-office competitor, might be jealous of. “He is trying to film God,” Mick LaSalle believes; he’s “attempting … to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of [...]
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
The Hurt Locker
The press has fallen in love with The Hurt Locker. For those of us who came of age during the combat-movie drought that wars like Iraq tend to engender—and who are typically disinclined to browse that genre at Blockbuster, besides—The Hurt Locker is like a first kiss. But I hesitate to stretch the metaphor, a.) [...]
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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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Monday, October 6th, 2008
Burn After Reading
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? It’s just caving in on [...]