Thursday, December 15th, 2011
Hugo
Big airports have always fascinated me. Thousands of passengers zipline back and forth on any given day: maybe on business, maybe coming home, maybe for a layover—perhaps as a tourist or gadabout. It’s a model U.N., with representatives from every part of the world trying to get to every other, but few transients stop to [...]
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Thursday, December 1st, 2011
The Muppets
It’s easy to get a Jim Henson contact high from watching The Muppets—even if, as Dana Stevens eloquently puts it, it’s just as easy to “kvetch and cavil about the details” like Statler and Waldorf, the ever-senescent season-ticket holders counted on to lob verbal tomatoes from the balcony. We begin the journey in Smalltown, U.S.A., [...]
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Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 deserves the praise it’s been given; and, to my surprise, the 15-year lag between this film and its progenitor actually serves to enhance its poignancy. When, in this installment, the playthings are exiled to a daycare center, it seems more like an old-folks’ home. Their owner, Andy, is off to college; his [...]
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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, 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 [...]