I absolutely love the first and last shots of Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. Each of them encompasses everything I like about his work in their straightforwardness, their simplicity, their understatement and their quiet, careful wit. These shots don’t push an … Continue reading Almost ready, almost there, or is it already over?
It’s be hard to find another film as awash in enthusiasm for its subject as The Muppets. Written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, who directed Segel’s previously produced screenplay Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the movie is really just Segel’s extended … Continue reading Footloose and fancy-free, getting there is half the fun, come share it with me
Though I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it, I still find it very odd to think of the director Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Departed presiding over a movie largely targeted at children, or at … Continue reading Hugo’s not afraid to cry, Hugo is an okay guy
There’s a wholly earned stereotype surrounding British films, best encapsulated by Eddie Izzard, who referred to the standard as Room with a View and a Staircase and a Pond type movies. These are the sort of efforts that reach their … Continue reading Take a left, a sharp left, and another left, meet me on the corner and we’ll start again
This much is certain about the small battalion of scruffy creators that Judd Apatow has cultivated: they’re really good and following in the footsteps of their benevolent mentor and nurturing along cohorts themselves. Seth Rogen was one of the cast … Continue reading I figure the odds be fifty-fifty I just might have something to say
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive was one of the true sensations of this year’s Cannes film festival. Though it may understandably seem otherwise, I don’t mean it as a knock when I note that I can completely understand that the contrast … Continue reading Who’s gonna tell you when it’s too late
I never read Moneyball, the 2003 nonfiction bestseller by Michael Lewis that serves as the source material for Bennett Miller’s long-awaited follow-up to the wonderful Capote, but I didn’t come into the film entirely blind either. The film focuses on … Continue reading You can get tangled in a ball of rubber bands and twine
One of the things I find most entertaining about Steven Soderbergh’s directorial career is the way so many of his films seem like they had their genesis as some sort of bar bet. “Bet you can’t make a big, glossy, … Continue reading A different disease in another translation, though you don’t understand the familiar sensation
Nim was the name given to a chimpanzee who was born in an Oklahoma research facility in late 1973. At the behest of a Columbia University professor named Herb Terrace, Nim was removed from his mother’s care at the earliest … Continue reading Standing in the concrete cave, swaying sad and insane
The first issue of Fantastic Four had a cover date of November 1961, making its release almost exactly fifty years ago. Though no one could have ever identified it as such at the time, it was a momentous moment for … Continue reading Now I’m calling all citizens from all over the world
Coffee for Two 