Screen
Take the psycho path
With massive mainstream media marketing rollouts and the box office boons reaped by free social media, movies so rarely surprise us these days. Shock cameos are spoiled in the space of a tweet, while most trailers render buying the proverbial “movie cow” moot when ...
Quirking on something different
To alter a phrase from Twain — who probably won’t mind because he’s dead — writer/ director Wes Anderson repeated history until he figured out how to rhyme. Barring a brief foray into stop-motion animation, Anderson’s oeuvre for the last decade redundantly hit the ...
These guys have all the fun
Somebody asked me, what would be a dream project of yours?” director Douglas Tirola recounts. “I immediately had this vision of a book on my shelf at home that I have had since I was a teenager — the 10th anniversary collection of National Lampoon...
You say you want a revolution?
The “99 percent vs. the 1 percent” analogy at work in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire has all the subtlety of a funeral selfie. But it is precisely this lack of sophistication in message that may make this the most zeitgeist-capturing, intellectually resonant sci-fi ...
Women, poorly portrayed
Thwarted by the same awkward timing that zonked Confessions of a Shopaholic two years ago, just when shopaholics began to seem extra-heinous, the film version of I Don’t Know How She Does It doesn’t know how to do what I think it’s trying to do...
When death misses
There was a scene, lo those many (OK, 11) years ago, in the original Final Destination. One of the characters who inadvertently “cheated death” and ruined “death’s grand design” had holed up in a cabin, which then had to be made accident-proof...
Reitman follows ‘Juno’ with ‘Up in the Air’
Airports, with their endless corridors, encourage a kind of...
Angry young white men
On Jan. 21, 1958, Charles Starkweather entered the Nebraska home of girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate and shot and killed her father, mother and 2-yearold sister. The two went on the lam and Starkweather slayed seven more over the course of eight days before surrendering ...
Way down Texas way
It’s 1950, and John Ford wants to make a movie: The Quiet Man, from a story by Maurice Walsh, about a retired boxer who...
Down to business; business accomplished
Getting low means getting down to business, in the parlance of the backwoods oddity played, wonderfully, by Robert Duvall in Get Low. Let’s get down to business, then. This film, calm but full of feeling, relays an intriguing story brought to life by some ...
Unfashionable life at a fashion magazine in ‘September Issue’
Two years ago may as well be 200 in this economy, a fact that gives the easygoing, entertaining court documentary The September Issue a certain poignancy. It's about the run-up to a late-boom-era capitalistic war, a triumph of advertising and frippery over rational ...
