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 [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
The Fighter
In On the Waterfront, a down-for-the-count Marlon Brando pined to his brother that he coulda been a contender, he coulda been somebody. And that’s basically what the half-brothers Dicky and Micky say to each other in David O. Russell’s The Fighter—substituting the past conditional for the past and future tenses, respectively. In the end, they [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
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. [...]
9 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
The Informant!
Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! may be an ingenious filmic experiment—a cinematic trompe l’oeil. It’s a modern retooling of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), with the schizoid circus-freak somnambulist wearing a white collar and a Middle American cornfed grin. Caligari, which explained away its zig-zagging Expressionism by putting the camera behind the eyes of a [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Martyrs
Seeing the new French horror film Martyrs is like going trick-or-treating and ending up with a frayed philosophy text in your pillowcase. The writer-director, Pascal Laugier, has modernized the biblical story of Job—who lost everything, except his faith in God—by giving it the grindhouse treatment, grafting on the carnage of cheapo slashers. His heroine is [...]