Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Everything Must Go
Everything Must Go—including the script. Heck, it’s a bargain: second-hand wisdom. The lede of one review asks, “Does Will Ferrell have a Bill Murray future?” To which I reply, “Probably not.” Murray has always been cool jazz—subtle, sarcastic, recessive. Ferrell isn’t hot jazz, exactly; but he’s a hot mess—completely, commercially, often hilariously, unsubtle. His satire [...]
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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, July 29th, 2010
Cyrus
Two of the biggest craniums in cinema are at loggerheads in Cyrus. They belong to John (John C. Reilly), a ringer for Shrek, and the eponymous man-child played by Jonah Hill, whose submerged neck forms a halo—like the frame around a medieval portrait of a saint. But, like the painted saints of way-back-when, there’s something [...]
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Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Iron Man 2
Iron Man 2 isn’t your daddy’s superhero movie. It’s your granddaddy’s. The steady torrent of wisecracks on the screen is indebted to the ’30s screwball comedies that accelerated newly audible dialogue to supersonic speed; and in this high-grade hybrid the screws are actual screws, and the balls energy-based projectiles launched from our hero’s metallic palm. [...]
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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 [...]