Thursday, January 12th, 2012
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Every yuppie’s uncle has read and raved about Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; but, having been burned by other such business-class classics as Angels and Demons, I couldn’t kick back the inertia enough to get past page five—especially since David Fincher, by directing the Hollywood version, seemed poised to render a time-consuming [...]
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Thursday, December 1st, 2011
The Muppets
It’s easy to get a Jim Henson contact high from watching The Muppets—even if, as Dana Stevens eloquently puts it, it’s just as easy to “kvetch and cavil about the details” like Statler and Waldorf, the ever-senescent season-ticket holders counted on to lob verbal tomatoes from the balcony. We begin the journey in Smalltown, U.S.A., [...]
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Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Even if I didn’t expect it, I should have: Our hirsute cousins are more compelling, and, generally speaking, more convincingly embodied than we are in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I should’ve also anticipated its tendentious way of getting from Point A to Point Ape. An hour and a half waiting period between [...]
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Thursday, August 4th, 2011
Captain America
Captain America is remarkably unremarkable as a movie. Each edge is so smoothly crenulate that you can smell the cookie-cutter that molded it; and, yes, this cookie came from a tube. Whereas nearly every major superhero franchise of the last decade has been spearheaded by a director who was taking to the Hollywood bank credits [...]
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Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The footage Michael Bay shot for Transformers: Dark of the Moon wasn’t edited; it was songified. A symphony played in an exotic time signature, perhaps? Well. Nah. It’s really just visual babbling: a sort of hand-in-glove match for the dialogue and its delivery. Bay’s got his brain in the blender with all the proceeds he’s [...]