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, 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 [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton’s misadventures in Wonderland are woefully miscalculated. Unlike Alice, who chased her dream down the rabbit-hole, the director seems to have stumbled into it. His Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a hole in the screen—an A-hole, to be precise. In this conception of Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century whimsies, the ingenue has been aged to the brink [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
I slipped into a 6:40 show of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at 6:50, hoping to have only missed some previews; instead, I apparently missed out on half the plot. Unless the director, Terry Gilliam, has devised a newfangled approach to storytelling that condenses an hour or more of exposition into a five-minute intro, I [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
The Informant!
Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! may be an ingenious filmic experiment—a cinematic trompe l’oeil. It’s a modern retooling of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), with the schizoid circus-freak somnambulist wearing a white collar and a Middle American cornfed grin. Caligari, which explained away its zig-zagging Expressionism by putting the camera behind the eyes of a [...]