Thursday, September 8th, 2011
Our Idiot Brother
Was it Charles Schulz who said that happiness is a fuzzy sweater? In the opening scene of Our Idiot Brother, set at a farmer’s market either in the thick of autumn or the clammy armpit of spring, Ned (Paul Rudd) wears a woolly Huxtable hand-me-down like his second skin—third, if you count the tie-dyed shirt [...]
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Thursday, August 25th, 2011
The Help
Pauline Kael wrote that the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, produced in 1962 and set in Alabama during the 1930s, was in “part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.” And now we have The Help, based on a 2009 best-seller set in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962, “honoring white viewers for not being [...]
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Thursday, August 11th, 2011
Crazy, Stupid, Love
If you can accept the pretense that Steve Carell would be married to Julianne Moore; that law-student Emma Stone is pre-engaged to Josh Groban (pretty awesome casting, actually); that Moore would cheat on Carell with Kevin Bacon; that that dissolves their marriage; that said marriage would produce a mind-numbingly precocious son, that species of old-soul [...]
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Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The footage Michael Bay shot for Transformers: Dark of the Moon wasn’t edited; it was songified. A symphony played in an exotic time signature, perhaps? Well. Nah. It’s really just visual babbling: a sort of hand-in-glove match for the dialogue and its delivery. Bay’s got his brain in the blender with all the proceeds he’s [...]
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Thursday, July 21st, 2011
Midnight in Paris
One of the fun things to do when playing critic is envisaging analogues—whether they end up useful to real people, or not. So with The Tree of Life still branching out through my ears, it seemed inevitable for me, in the lamplight of Midnight in Paris, to extend Malick’s branch all the way to Woody [...]