Thursday, September 29th, 2011
The Future
“The fault,” Cassius tells Brutus in Julius Caesar, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Just as the fault is not in the moon, but in himself, when Jason (Hamish Linklater) freezes time in Miranda July’s film The Future, and supplicates the nearest celestial object to let him off the hook. His wife, Sophie [...]
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Thursday, September 8th, 2011
Our Idiot Brother
Was it Charles Schulz who said that happiness is a fuzzy sweater? In the opening scene of Our Idiot Brother, set at a farmer’s market either in the thick of autumn or the clammy armpit of spring, Ned (Paul Rudd) wears a woolly Huxtable hand-me-down like his second skin—third, if you count the tie-dyed shirt [...]
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Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Sucker Punch
The beer in my gut from before I hit Sucker Punch doesn’t preclude me from knowing what the film was about; I only wish it did. The trailer had me fooled that maybe Zack Snyder, directing his own material for the first time, had gone ballistic in a redeemable, wacko-Zacko way. I’ve successfully evaded his [...]
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Thursday, December 16th, 2010
Howl
Howl is a hardcover CliffsNotes of Allen Ginsberg’s poem. It may not have its own legs to stand on, but it has a handsome body, albeit one assembled in an unusual way. A mishmash of styles, it’s Frankenstein’s monster as a svelte if suave hunk, and though it can’t seem to find its own voice, [...]
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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 [...]