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, July 21st, 2011
Midnight in Paris
One of the fun things to do when playing critic is envisaging analogues—whether they end up useful to real people, or not. So with The Tree of Life still branching out through my ears, it seemed inevitable for me, in the lamplight of Midnight in Paris, to extend Malick’s branch all the way to Woody [...]
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Thursday, July 14th, 2011
The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s movies are often called “magical,” and that’s typically not applied in the pejorative; but his sway has elements that Lord Voldemort, his unlikely box-office competitor, might be jealous of. “He is trying to film God,” Mick LaSalle believes; he’s “attempting … to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of [...]
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Thursday, February 24th, 2011
The Eagle
The collapse of Western Civilization is pretty in these days. To varying degrees, it colored some of the most important American films of 2007 and 2008: WALL-E, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood all flirted with Revelations. And if terrorism isn’t the tipping point, or Sept. 11, the Internet, or Iraq, [...]
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Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Avatar
It seems a faux pas to review Avatar from any spiritual age older than 12. If my prepubescent self could be roused for comment, he’d probably say, “Gee whiz, those 3-D blue-cat people are totally rad!” But as a (slightly) older person, who views excessive promotion in the same way that that 12-year-old viewed cooties, [...]