Thursday, November 25th, 2010
Hereafter
Watching Hereafter is like spending Halloween at church. Clint Eastwood has been directing a lot of Hail Marys at us lately; he’s made a career of repenting—of cleaning Dirty Harry’s blood off his hands. Here, working with the playwright Peter Morgan (who wrote The Queen and the light-on-its-feet Frost/Nixon), there isn’t a spot of blood, [...]
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Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Air Doll
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll has a completely foreign sensibility. It’s not American, and it’s not one I’d take immediately for Japanese. We see Hideo (Itsuji Itao, who looks like a pooped-out Mathieu Amalric) press his face against the glass of a commuter train window; the raindrops on the windowpane are a barrier between him and [...]
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Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
When I saw Hot Fuzz back in 2007, with a couple of compadres, it was like quaffing a cinematic yagerbomb; all I wanted to do afterward was cut loose, do a few keg-stands, and then chittychat my way into some soon-to-be-regretted-but-blissful stupor. What I’m saying, I suppose, is that Edgar Wright’s film put me in [...]
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Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 deserves the praise it’s been given; and, to my surprise, the 15-year lag between this film and its progenitor actually serves to enhance its poignancy. When, in this installment, the playthings are exiled to a daycare center, it seems more like an old-folks’ home. Their owner, Andy, is off to college; his [...]
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Monday, March 29th, 2010
Hot Tub Time Machine
I wish John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke could go back in time and salvage the title Hot Tub Time Machine. The movie doesn’t live up to it. Their Wellsian jacuzzi takes them to 1986—not even far enough to prevent this from being a rip-off of Back to the Future, which came [...]