Twitter Review: An Education
Based on a memoir, the facile, impatient ‘An Education’ is incredible, and glosses over its most compelling element: the facilitating family
Based on Real Events
Twitter Review: Milk
‘Milk’ – It neither over-simplifies nor beatifies, but in a largely glowing portrait, Harvey Milk remains a mystery. Still, a great pleasure
Tagged: Based on Real Events, Biopics, Gus Van Sant, Milk, Politics, Reviews, Twitter, Twitter Reviews
Twitter Review: Zodiac
‘Zodiac’ – Subtly but thoroughly subversive and odd, Fincher’s procedural is radical in construction but goes down easily. A quiet triumph.
Amateur Hours
As a member of the choir, I ran screaming from the church because of Michael Moore’s preaching in Sicko. Plus: the equally inept Infamous.
Blowing It
Both Brokeback Mountain and Munich are patient, well-made genre movies that strip most of the politics out of charged subjects. Sadly, both are also botches.
The Truman Show
Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his performance in Capote, one I found a mite calculating. The film as a whole suffers from a similar malady: It seems to operate more cautiously than deliberately, a hint too restrained and with a trace of self-conscious uncertainty. Yet, fundamentally, the studied, low-key choices work.
Boilerplate Biopic
There’s nothing wrong with Ray that a little less hype couldn’t fix. As biopics go, it’s pretty good. Jamie Foxx is convincing as the iconic Ray Charles. Writer James L. White and writer/director Taylor Hackford employ a clumsily expository flashback structure that actually pays off beautifully at the end with a startling and unexpected moment of transcendence and vision. Two and a half hours clip by briskly. And there’s plenty of Charles’ music.
Tagged: Based on Real Events, Biopics, Dramas, Jamie Foxx, Ray, Ray Charles, Reviews, Taylor Hackford
The Serial Killer as Victim
With Monster, writer/director Patty Jenkins has fashioned a story of insistent, persistent desperation that is so fully embodied by Charlize Theron that I had a hard time believing the movie’s politics and psychology were so facile.
Spoiling Spoilers
The highest compliment I can pay to Kevin Macdonald’s Touching the Void is that few people will notice how radical it is. It’s a completely gripping, horrifying movie, and it’s so good that it’s easy to overlook what Macdonald has done: seriously undercut the idea that plot “spoilers” damage the experience one has with a movie.
Blaming for Columbine
It’s difficult to understand a person who thought a shot-for-shot re-make of Psycho was anything more than a self-indulgent exercise, but faced with writer/director Gus Van Sant’s puzzling Elephant, I’m forced to try.
Tagged: Based on Real Events, Dramas, Elephant, Gus Van Sant, Reviews, Violence
