Thursday, December 29th, 2011
The Descendants
The Descendants is an escape to the ordinary. Alexander Payne’s first feature since Sideways is also his second since leaving Nebraska; it proves afresh that you can take the director out of Omaha, but you can’t take Omaha out of the director. At least that’s the message encoded in the opening monologue—one I was happy [...]
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Thursday, December 8th, 2011
The Artist
People speak of The Artist as if its being a black-and-white silent film were a liability. As if the Weinsteins were taking a risk tantamount to installing hand cranks in the whole bevy of new Beamers. But that assumes that The Artist is an audacious work of art, and not the screen equivalent of the [...]
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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, November 3rd, 2011
The Rum Diary
Maybe the consensus is correct: Maybe The Rum Diary should’ve been called The Rum Diarrhea. Without tipping the scale from mildly clever to insouciantly crass, the film’s narrative sense is slushy—as if all involved were taking their orders from Captain Morgan, rather than screenwriter-director Bruce Robinson—and, yes, I dare say, it gets runny. But some [...]
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Thursday, September 29th, 2011
The Future
“The fault,” Cassius tells Brutus in Julius Caesar, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Just as the fault is not in the moon, but in himself, when Jason (Hamish Linklater) freezes time in Miranda July’s film The Future, and supplicates the nearest celestial object to let him off the hook. His wife, Sophie [...]