Lyle Lovett has too much Texas in him to break onto the pop charts, but his soul wanders too far afield for him to make much of a mark in country. He loves the fiddle and slide guitar, but also the brass and gospel, and he has a perfectionist streak that makes him better suited to detail-rich pop songs and austere, aching ballads. He should be a hero to the alt-country generation, but he’s too polished.
Carl Franklin’s Out of Time most closely resembles a roller coaster. The first 45 minutes are a long, clunky, and agonizingly dull climb up the hill, and the last hour is all momentum, action, and thrills.
When I think about Sin City, the memory is of watching a cartoon. Not merely a striking approximation of the graphic novel on celluloid, but animation; it seems as if what I saw involved no live actors.
Closer is a work – and here I mean both the play by Patrick Marber and the 2004 movie adaptation he wrote – that might be an imposing piece of art if it weren’t so fucking stupid.
Our dark thrillers have been reduced to highly stylized snuff and torture affairs, trying to give audiences cinematic pleasure exclusively through the casual presentation of the suffering of others. I’m not terribly surprised, and I’m less troubled by Saw itself than the fact that it didn’t bother me.
Mr. 3000 is the Dave of sports movies. Which is to say: It’s a good-hearted fantasy that sacrifices accuracy of detail in its chosen arena (in this case, baseball) in the interest of being emotionally resonant.
The 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead is as derivative as you’d expect and still manages to be, surprisingly, pretty damned good.
Zach Braff of TV’s Scrubs wrote, directed, and stars in Garden State, and I’m guessing people much younger than I think it is, as the kids say, “the shit.”
Aborted and brief writing on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Big Fish, and The Barbarian Invasions
The 10 greatest actors of “our” generation? (Whatever “our” means.) According to GQ, those great arbiters of cinema, it’s these boys: Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey, Don Cheadle, Russell Crowe, Benicio Del Toro, Johnny Depp, Leonardo, DiCaprio, Gael Garcia Bernal, Clive Owen, and John C. Reilly. It’s a very pretty list, Cage and Reilly excepted. (Via Salon.)
