Thursday, November 17th, 2011
Melancholia
One of the hallmarks of a depressed mind is what Travis Bickle called “morbid self-attention.” Perhaps that explains why the depressed mind behind Melancholia—the film that Lars von Trier was supposedly trying to promote during his foot-in-mouth outbreak at Cannes this year—is so acute at describing the condition, as well as the delusions that always [...]
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Thursday, January 13th, 2011
True Grit
Early on in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, the characters go to see a trio of desperadoes hang. As soon as the condemned Chocktaw opens his mouth to recite his last words, the executioner drapes a black hood over his head and the platform beneath gives way to kingdom come. It’s a sly trick—one that [...]
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Thursday, July 1st, 2010
The Square
In keeping with a tradition otherwise upheld only by Pixar, The Square is preceded by a nine-minute short called Spider—a hilarious macabre hoodwink, clean as clockwork, with nastily prankish timing. This appetizer got my mouth watering; it should have set the tone for the feature to come, which was produced by the same team of [...]
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010
And the Winner for the Best Picture of 2009 is . . .
Paid, as I am, merely by my satisfaction in writing and yours in reading, I don’t fritter my hours away compiling the best-of lists that the pros—much to us amateurs’ collective pleasure—slave away at, or the sort of star-studded, red-carpet reportage that asks the celebutantes who they’re wearing. (Those queries make me wish that Buffalo [...]
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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. [...]