Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton’s misadventures in Wonderland are woefully miscalculated. Unlike Alice, who chased her dream down the rabbit-hole, the director seems to have stumbled into it. His Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a hole in the screen—an A-hole, to be precise. In this conception of Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century whimsies, the ingenue has been aged to the brink […]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
I slipped into a 6:40 show of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at 6:50, hoping to have only missed some previews; instead, I apparently missed out on half the plot. Unless the director, Terry Gilliam, has devised a newfangled approach to storytelling that condenses an hour or more of exposition into a five-minute intro, I […]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are
A few months ago, a conservative politician callously derided a liberal bill, claiming that its “empathy” was just a slippery slope to partisanship. One does not need to be partisan—or even political—to realize that empathy is the last bastion of civilized thought. If empathy becomes a “partisan” issue, rather than something generally recognized for its […]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Cold Souls
Cold Souls is a diaphanous nocturne—a little metaphysical flower lilting in the gray autumnal light. Paul Giamatti plays himself or, rather, the person we might infer Paul Giamatti to be, given the schlub-everyman he incarnated in American Splendor and Sideways. He’s playing in Chekhov on Broadway, but can’t get out of his own head and […]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Ponyo
Escaping the balmy summer heat in an air-conditioned theater playing Ponyo is like taking an epistemic holiday. Arguably, I suppose, one could say that about many movies―particularly foreign ones―and that’s certainly one of the medium’s charms; but rarely are movies as breezily surreal as this animated import by Hayao Miyazaki. The setting is not far […]