Twitter Review: The Informant!
‘The Informant!’ imposes a screwball score and exclamation point on a story that’s absurd but rarely funny. Only Damon’s investment engages.
‘The Informant!’ imposes a screwball score and exclamation point on a story that’s absurd but rarely funny. Only Damon’s investment engages.
‘Invention of Lying’ has a simple, resonant premise but is made without rigor. Only intermittent ingenuity saves it from offensive laziness.
Like Selick’s other animations, ‘Coraline’ is merely weird. While imaginative, meticulous, and thematically rich, it’s dull and oddly inert.
Regardless of which film takes home Best Picture on Sunday night, the Academy Awards finally got it right. I don’t mean that the best movie of 2009 will have won, even if one only considers the 10 nominees. Rather, the Oscars have chosen a sound voting system – an instant-runoff election – that nearly guarantees that every ballot will help determine whether Avatar or The Hurt Locker nabs the prize.
Writer/director David Spaltro’s debut feature …Around concerns a film-school student who lives out of train stations in New York City, and the movie has such a distinctive, Pollyanna view of homelessness that it’s either completely divorced from reality or born of some charmed experience. In an interview last month, Spaltro called …Around “a very personal story to me. I never use the term ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography,’ because I think even if you’re being extremely honest, when you start writing or creating anything, it’s always fiction in some way, because you can only tell your perspective or your memories.” That’s a roundabout way of saying that Spaltro lived out of a train station while going to film school. He put his tuition on credit cards, aiming to pay the minimum each month, but “then I realized I’d have no money for living.” He read an article about a student calling a public library home, and … there you go.
Finished Battlestar Galactica. Can I sue Ronald D. Moore to get 3,234 minutes back? Loved the conception and arc; often hated the execution.
Maynard James Keenan – the frontman for prog-metal gods Tool, the co-leader of A Perfect Circle, and the founder of Puscifer – isn’t the type of person you’d expect to see as the subject of a thorough documentary. He has a reputation for being reclusive, and for jealously guarding his privacy. As he says in the movie Blood Into Wine, “I’m not much of a people person.” Yet Keenan, along with his wine-making partner Eric Glomski, is at the center of that documentary, a freewheeling but thoughtful mix of wine primer, underdog story, buddy picture, and sketch comedy.
‘Hurt Locker’ overplays its coda but is an intense serial with authenticity and narrative momentum, and the script lets the actors carry it.
‘Harvard Beats Yale’ ably manages character, context, and Gore/Bush digressions, but it fumbles the game: erratic pacing and odd inclusions.
The sci-fi of ‘Moon’ is philosophical, humane, rigorous, and austere, and I adore the robot’s hopeful emoticon expressions; that feels right