I was surprised after watching (and then reading reviews of) the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man that there was such a fervent (if small) backlash against it. The movie – about a Job-like Jewish professor in a Minnesota suburb in the late 1960s – struck me as so right that I didn’t allow for opposite reactions. Yet there they are.
I fought Millions for as long as I could. But in the end, it won. It’s a charming little movie that casts magical realism as the mind of a child. Plus: an easy dismissal of Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
A friend made me feel really stupid about my review of the new Candyman. He said I was “way wrong about a lot of fundamental things.” Pressed to explain, he wrote: “In a nutshell, that the movie was designed for people like you and me – for a prototypical white-person audience. I’d argue that that’s the very reason DaCosta doesn’t give us the scenes we expect, and why the only violence we see is directed toward white people. Black people don’t NEED to see more violence toward Blacks. It’s fine for it to be implied.”
In the opening of 28 Weeks Later, Don (Robert Carlyle) faces a dilemma: He can leave his wife to die and run like hell on the off chance that he might outrun the “infected,” or he can stay with her and face a gruesome end. He runs like hell, and looks back to see his wife attacked. This is the movie writ small, laying the groundwork for more impossible choices.
I had an amazing moment watching Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men. When the movie’s twist was revealed, I immediately felt cheated. I’ve seen a few con-artist films in my day, and this one – which had seemed so promising and interesting and different – was suddenly just the same as David Mamet’s, particularly House of Games.
In 1999, the person I’d just started dating commented in an e-mail that every time she read the Stephen King essay about baseball, she knew what it felt like to be one of those little leaguers, even though she (at the time) knew little of baseball and less of little league. I was struck immediately: It’s not how I felt in little league.
How about a magic trick? I shall transform Christopher Nolan’s 144-minute The Dark Knight into a significantly better movie by trimming eight minutes from it.
Candyman is an A movie desperately trying to break out of its B-movie body, like a 12-year-old boy wanting to prove his manhood. It is a slasher film, but it pushes and tugs and stretches to become something more. That it succeeds at all is pretty amazing.
In Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, director Peter Weir establishes his tremendous skill almost immediately. The audience is dropped on board the Surprise as a mysterious vessel is lurking in the fog, perhaps nothing but maybe an enemy. When the phantom ship attacks, the audience is thrust into battle without the exposition that is de rigueur in Hollywood fare. You might not be able to follow the specifics of what’s happening, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Surprise is getting the shit pounded out of her.
Rolling Stone’s “Rock and Roll Daily” has started a series on double albums that can be (and should have been) pared down to single discs. And not just one 80-minute CD; the idea is to hack the bloated monster down to an LP.
