Culture Snob Here is a movie that so badly wants you to cry and to feel the heartbreak of emotionally stunted characters and to bask in their eventual breakthroughs that I did my damnedest to resist it. In America is one of the most shamelessly manipulative art-house movies you’ll ever find. It works surprisingly well.
The highest compliment I can pay to Kevin Macdonald’s Touching the Void is that few people will notice how radical it is. It’s a completely gripping, horrifying movie, and it’s so good that it’s easy to overlook what Macdonald has done: seriously undercut the idea that plot “spoilers” damage the experience one has with a movie.
The New York Review of Books has an excellent piece in its July 15 issue on the nature of criticism. It deals specifically with Dale Peck’s already notorious Hatchet Jobs – which, of course, I haven’t read – and concerns itself primarily with the role of the critic. The author’s conclusion is that Peck is too busy “punishing” the authors he’s slamming to effectively “judge” them, and that Peck needs to offer an alternative to the books he loathes to be a good critic.
Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban won me over quickly and didn’t loose its grip. Unfortunately, I fear it will become the series’ The Empire Strikes Back – the pinnacle that shows the bankruptcy of the rest of the entries. And for that, we should thank the good executives at Warner Brothers.
Netflix has ruined my life. Oh, it’s not quite that bad, but it has certainly altered the role of movies in my life. While they have been important to me, probably to a fault, now films have become the sun around which our leisure time orbits, to the point that leisure time isn’t quite so leisurely.
It’s difficult to understand a person who thought a shot-for-shot re-make of Psycho was anything more than a self-indulgent exercise, but faced with writer/director Gus Van Sant’s puzzling Elephant, I’m forced to try.
A marker of getting old – not old old, but well beyond one’s 20s – is recognizing the flaws of something once adored in youth. Twice recently I’ve had that experience, once while watching Peter Weir’s Fearless (from 1993) and more recently with Dolores Claiborne, the 1995 movie directed by Taylor Hackford and adapted from the Stephen King novel by Tony Gilroy.
Ever since his movie The Big One, I’ve had serious problems with Michael Moore’s approach and ego. In writing about Bowling for Columbine, I said that “The Big One made me feel like all the troubles of the world weren’t quite as important as Michael Moore being famous in his own odd way.” This article/essay/interview, prompted by the filmmaker’s Fahrenheit 9/11 at Cannes, will confirm most people’s worst fears about Moore, particularly the fairly obvious contradiction of a very wealthy person pretending to be a man of the people. He’s glib and dismisses criticisms without ever addressing them.
Most reviews of the Oscar-nominated animated French movie The Triplets of Belleville suggest the film is a wonderfully wacky laugh riot. I liked it, but its strength for me was the way it balanced an inspired visual stylization with a dark human reality: the way people sleepwalk through their lives with single-minded purpose but little joy.
