Thursday, August 4th, 2011
Captain America
Captain America is remarkably unremarkable as a movie. Each edge is so smoothly crenulate that you can smell the cookie-cutter that molded it; and, yes, this cookie came from a tube. Whereas nearly every major superhero franchise of the last decade has been spearheaded by a director who was taking to the Hollywood bank credits [...]
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Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Everything Must Go
Everything Must Go—including the script. Heck, it’s a bargain: second-hand wisdom. The lede of one review asks, “Does Will Ferrell have a Bill Murray future?” To which I reply, “Probably not.” Murray has always been cool jazz—subtle, sarcastic, recessive. Ferrell isn’t hot jazz, exactly; but he’s a hot mess—completely, commercially, often hilariously, unsubtle. His satire [...]
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Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Sucker Punch
The beer in my gut from before I hit Sucker Punch doesn’t preclude me from knowing what the film was about; I only wish it did. The trailer had me fooled that maybe Zack Snyder, directing his own material for the first time, had gone ballistic in a redeemable, wacko-Zacko way. I’ve successfully evaded his [...]
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Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Inception
When Leonardo DiCaprio washed ashore at the beginning of Inception, I thought that Jack had survived the sinking of the Titanic. But if he had, it would only be to drown in the subconscious depths that this movie layers on. Don’t get me wrong: This new film, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, is artful [...]
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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 [...]