Thursday, October 6th, 2011
Moneyball
Moneyball is straight-backed popular art: a folk-hero biopic with a vision as bright and clear as one of Derek Jeter’s urine samples. It’s a year (2001-2) in the life of a crazily American “genius,” Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who, as the real-life general manager of the Oakland Athletics, was the first person to put Bill [...]
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Thursday, December 16th, 2010
Howl
Howl is a hardcover CliffsNotes of Allen Ginsberg’s poem. It may not have its own legs to stand on, but it has a handsome body, albeit one assembled in an unusual way. A mishmash of styles, it’s Frankenstein’s monster as a svelte if suave hunk, and though it can’t seem to find its own voice, [...]
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Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
Fair Game
There are a few scenes in Fair Game, laid in bars or at dinner parties and set during the lead-up to the Iraq War, in which a gaggle of rather well-heeled, soigné Washingtonians casually discuss current events with their friends, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), the former ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe, and [...]
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Thursday, October 14th, 2010
The Social Network
The Social Network, scripted by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, is a remarkably engrossing docudrama. By the time the closing credits began to roll, I’d nearly forgotten that I was in a theater—much less that I had to leave it. I was skeptical at first. Taking off from The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich’s [...]
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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 [...]