Thursday, January 19th, 2012
A Dangerous Method
Slavoj Žižek once said that the goal of traditional psychoanalysis was to help patients overcome their internal prohibitions so that life could be freely enjoyed; but that “the problem today is that the commandment of the ruling ideologies is ‘enjoy.’” In other words, society now promotes what it used to require we repress. What happened [...]
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Thursday, December 29th, 2011
The Descendants
The Descendants is an escape to the ordinary. Alexander Payne’s first feature since Sideways is also his second since leaving Nebraska; it proves afresh that you can take the director out of Omaha, but you can’t take Omaha out of the director. At least that’s the message encoded in the opening monologue—one I was happy [...]
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Thursday, November 17th, 2011
Melancholia
One of the hallmarks of a depressed mind is what Travis Bickle called “morbid self-attention.” Perhaps that explains why the depressed mind behind Melancholia—the film that Lars von Trier was supposedly trying to promote during his foot-in-mouth outbreak at Cannes this year—is so acute at describing the condition, as well as the delusions that always [...]
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Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
The Rum Diary
Maybe the consensus is correct: Maybe The Rum Diary should’ve been called The Rum Diarrhea. Without tipping the scale from mildly clever to insouciantly crass, the film’s narrative sense is slushy—as if all involved were taking their orders from Captain Morgan, rather than screenwriter-director Bruce Robinson—and, yes, I dare say, it gets runny. But some [...]
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Thursday, October 27th, 2011
Tabloid
The confessional documentary is as morally gray as a tabloid and as potentially colorless as a broadsheet. If a subject is made to play the fool, whose fault is it? Are they marionettes or the scene-stealing stars of their own one-man shows? Embedded in those answers is our permission to exercise an alienable right that [...]