Culture Snob The handsome Good Night, and Good Luck is a joy to behold but short on ideas, drama, and humanity. It ends up being a dull film documenting the dull work of dull television journalists, when it really wants to be a sober but nostalgic reminder of heroic muckrakers bringing down the big bad bigot of the Red Scare. Perhaps most crucially, as a lesson for our times it’s a deeply flawed comparison.
At The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz hosts a discussion on whether the new wave of grisly horror movies means something culturally, and what these films are saying.
Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his performance in Capote, one I found a mite calculating. The film as a whole suffers from a similar malady: It seems to operate more cautiously than deliberately, a hint too restrained and with a trace of self-conscious uncertainty. Yet, fundamentally, the studied, low-key choices work.
A real-time discussion of Billy Ray’s 2003 movie about New Republic faker Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) and his editor (Peter Sarsgaard). This commentary track is meant to be listened to while watching the movie. The audio file (mp3 format, roughly 16 megabytes, 94 minutes) features Culture Snob joined by River Cities’ Reader film critic Mike Schulz, with important contributions from Bride of Culture Snob, and at least one interjection from Bad Dog Ginger. Click to download.
Used in conjunction with author Robert Bly, “Iron John” has come to symbolize gatherings in which men drum and dance in the woods, unleashing their own wild sides. It has been credited as a spark to the “men’s movement,” and attacked as trying to equate the emotional suffering of men with centuries of oppression of women. All of those things carry at least a hint of truth, but they ignore what Bly’s Iron John is really about: the idea that men are worn down and worn out, even as they’ve become more sensitive to the planet and their mates.
Vanity Fair’s James Walcott revealed himself to be both puzzlingly moronic and a fine wit in separate posts last month.
Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies is a work whose very title, with its cheesy double meaning, portends bad, blunt things. If it works at all, it’s as an act of self-parody, in which the filmmaker’s heady concerns are consumed by the tripe of his ostensible subject matter. Plus: the tedium of 2046.
I get irritated by commentators who claim that major-college football and men’s basketball are a priori corrupt. (I’m talking about you, King Kaufman.) I don’t disagree with the assertion; I object to the conclusion as an unsubstantiated premise, an article of faith. On the other hand, we often create this mythic aura of purity around underdogs.
Matt Zoller Seitz continues to clearly and insightfully break down the new season of The Sopranos. In his post on “Join the Club,” he makes a connection that seems obvious now, but it eluded me when I watched the episode: With Tony’s brain playing out an alternative existence, The Sopranos is paying its respects to Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.
The unfortunately neglected Happy Endings has the unfixed, casually natural sexuality of Pedro Almodóvar, the existential screwball absurdity of I ♥ Huckabees, an offhanded but sincere interest in serious themes, and the voyeuristic allure of watching people try to extricate themselves from traps set by their own stupidity and greed. Plus: a Wizard of Oz for the 21st Century, and the kinda crappy clarity of Asylum.
