Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
Contagion
Right before the lights went down and Contagion got underway, my buddy asked if this was a bad movie for us to be sharing popcorn at; and for the first few minutes, my answer was a withering “Uh-huh….” Steven Soderbergh lingers a few extra seconds on a much-fingered bowl of peanuts at a bar in [...]
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Thursday, March 17th, 2011
The Adjustment Bureau
The Adjustment Bureau has a rather writerly conception of theology. “The Chairman”—who the movie neither confirms nor denies to be Frank Sinatra—never seems to be satisfied with the most recent draft of Creation, so he’s constantly tweaking it. In order that everything goes to plan, he has agents of the eponymous bureaucracy always on the [...]
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Thursday, January 13th, 2011
True Grit
Early on in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, the characters go to see a trio of desperadoes hang. As soon as the condemned Chocktaw opens his mouth to recite his last words, the executioner drapes a black hood over his head and the platform beneath gives way to kingdom come. It’s a sly trick—one that [...]
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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, November 4th, 2010
Inside Job
Sometimes I wonder if the raison d’être of the financial-services industry is exacting payback for all those kids who were dunked in the toilet in middle school because they were good at math. Fortunately, Charles Ferguson, the documentarian who made Inside Job—and earned a degree in mathematics from Berkeley—has a much more nuanced take on [...]