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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Saturday, June 13th, 2009
Up
These days, Pixar stands alone in being a reliable source for “family” entertainment that doesn’t leave any quarters cringing. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that I recoil whenever anyone self-identifies as a “Pixar dork”—as if it were unusual to appreciate something that’s both critically acclaimed and gobbled up by the masses. That peculiarly self-serving form [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
The Fall
I am, by nature, suspicious of any director who goes by one name, but with The Fall, Tarsem has created a movie that’s wonderful in all senses of the word. The story, set in the late 1910s or early ’20s in a hospital in Los Angeles, is seen through the eyes of a little Indian [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Be Kind Rewind
Be Kind Rewind is nothing but a trifle: a sweet, technically crude little comedy. It’s of note only because it is so terribly put together, and yet the work of an artist whose reputation is based on technical sophistication. Writer-director Michel Gondry’s experimental techniques beautifully served Charlie Kaufman’s unorthodox screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the [...]