Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things
The Orphanage has one indelible image, and that’s plenty. It also has a sly current of grief and healing that hits home mostly on reflection, after cold recognitions and resonances sink in.
Movies
Box Office Power Rankings: May 2-4, 2008
So the 2008 summer-movie season begins the way the last ended: with a perfect score. Iron Man became the first movie since The Bourne Ultimatum in August to top all four of the Box Office Power Rankings criteria.
Production Design Blog-a-thon
At the Too Many Projects Film Club, Jeremy Bushnell will host the Production Design Blog-a-thon from May 19 through 25.
It’s a fantastic idea.
Tagged: Blog-a-thons, Production Design
Moral Abstraction
Roughly halfway into Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, the movie is finished. The plot involving a kidnapped youth has been apparently, tragically resolved. But the movie still has an hour left, a clockwatcher will tell you. And even if you’re not a person regularly calculating how the anticipated remaining X plot will unfold in the remaining Y minutes, you know that there’s plenty left to come.
Tagged: Ben Affleck, Books Into Film, Dramas, Gone Baby Gone, Reviews, Thrillers
The Week of Quitting
In the past week, two major movie writers on the Web, Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door and Raymond Young of Flickhead, hung up their stinky blogging shoes. Tim Lucas smells a trend.
Tagged: Critics, Self-Involvement
Box Office Power Rankings: April 18-27, 2008
Welcome to summer movie season, now officially begun on the first weekend of May thanks to our friends at Iron Man. That blockbuster wannabe will be followed in short order by Speed Racer, Narnia’s second installment, and Indiana Jones before Memorial Day. Closing out the ever-modest spring movie season, Forgetting Sarah Marshall notched one outright victory and one shared victory in our Box Office Power Rankings, scoring a mild upset by tying Baby Mama in last weekend’s rankings.
Burnt Toast
The turning point in The Shining comes when Jack Torrance encounters a woman in Room 237. Naked, lithe, and beautiful, she gets out of the bathtub and wordlessly approaches Jack. They kiss, but when Jack looks in the mirror, his arms are embracing a decaying old woman, flabby and with patches of her skin missing. It’s not your typical turning point. A heretofore pedestrian movie doesn’t begin to redeem itself, and a previously engaging work doesn’t go off the rails. Instead, things start to get muddled.
Tagged: Books Into Film, Horror, Reviews, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, The Shining
Box Office Power Rankings: April 11-13, 2008
Everything new feels old. Al Pacino, at age 67, is the lead in a thriller that was filmed in 2005. It’s called 88 Minutes but runs 108 minutes. That’s old times three, methinks. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the fifth Judd Apatow-produced movie released in the past 11 months. And Keanu Reeves is on top of this week’s Box Office Power Rankings.
Box Office Power Rankings: March 28-April 6, 2008
Our Box Office Power Rankings have been grim in recent weeks. George Clooney’s Leatherheads tops this week’s rankings – breaking Horton’s three-week reign – and was the second-best-reviewed movie in the top 10 with mediocre Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 53 and 56, respectively. It’s a bad crop out there, people. So it seems appropriate to get grimmer with Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Funny Games.
Box Office Power Rankings: March 14-23, 2008
Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who dominated the Box Office Power Rankings the past two weekends, but it was Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns that taught us an important lesson: It’s good to not suck as much as everybody else.
