In an admiring but fundamentally dismissive review, Matt Zoller Seitz argues that Children of Men’s subject matter necessitates a treatment more rigorous and pointed. The implication is that movies that recall real-world horrors have some responsibility to them, and I don’t necessarily buy that. A film shouldn’t trivialize suffering, but serious politics (and shameful history) shouldn’t be off-limits for entertainments. Plus: Casino Royale and Borat.
Unlike some people, I liked – perhaps even loved – the finale of Lost. It would have been churlish to deny fans who had invested six years in the show a happy ending, and while the sideways/afterlife reunion was cheap and sentimental, it worked. And it worked in part because it defied the expected coming together of the sixth season’s two universes. And it worked because it offered a payoff to those hooked by the characters and not just the mythology.
I was willing to go with Jared Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite up until the very first exclamation of “Gosh!”
One thing you might notice picking up Daniel Woodrell’s novel Winter’s Bone is how thin it is – less than 200 pages. And when you start reading, you might be struck that it’s been carved incredibly lean. While relatively plainspoken, the sentences are dense, with a mix of dialect from the Ozarks and artfully turned idioms that feel instantly right. One has to sip Woodrell’s language. “I do like to make it apparent to the reader that you need to probably read everything,” Woodrell said in a phone interview in April. “‘I won’t put in any flab, but you have to read what’s here’ is kind of my deal with the reader. … Pay attention to the sentences.”
In A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fervid need to turn everything into fussy, over-processed whimsy is wholly incongruous with its primary subject: war.
Imagine a mystery story in which the detective started to explain the killer’s method and motive, paused 30 seconds in, and said, “It’s pretty convoluted. Let’s skip that part.” That’s how the Oscar-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room works.
The lyrics that open Low’s Drums and Guns are as forceful as singer/guitarist Alan Sparhawk is tentative.
The hand-wringing going on right now about the state of Hollywood and the Oscars is a bizarre mix of long-overdue self-awareness and stubborn self-delusion. Observers have noted with much shock that people aren’t going to movies that much and that none of the Oscar nominees is a genuinely popular movie. But these are long-standing trends.
The Stepford Wives is the strange case of an awful movie that somehow became part of the cultural vocabulary. How could something so unambiguously bad penetrate so deeply into our society?
Eye of God is a great demonstration of the power of structure. The 1996 film written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson piles cliché upon cliché. And yet, the movie works.
