Thursday, December 15th, 2011
Hugo
Big airports have always fascinated me. Thousands of passengers zipline back and forth on any given day: maybe on business, maybe coming home, maybe for a layover—perhaps as a tourist or gadabout. It’s a model U.N., with representatives from every part of the world trying to get to every other, but few transients stop to [...]
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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 [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 24th, 2011
Vision
I was going batty trying to figure out who the star of Vision, Barbara Sukowa, reminded me of—and then, like a godsmack, it hit me: Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. This is an odd affinity, considering that Sukowa is playing Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century Rhenish abbess whose resurgence has made strange bedfellows of Catholic, [...]
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Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are
A few months ago, a conservative politician callously derided a liberal bill, claiming that its “empathy” was just a slippery slope to partisanship. One does not need to be partisan—or even political—to realize that empathy is the last bastion of civilized thought. If empathy becomes a “partisan” issue, rather than something generally recognized for its [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
The Hurt Locker
The press has fallen in love with The Hurt Locker. For those of us who came of age during the combat-movie drought that wars like Iraq tend to engender—and who are typically disinclined to browse that genre at Blockbuster, besides—The Hurt Locker is like a first kiss. But I hesitate to stretch the metaphor, a.) [...]