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Everyone is Just Visiting in Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor
The Visitor is the excellent sophomore effort from Thomas McCarthy, writer/director of The Station Agent (2003). The disgustingly talented McCarthy is also an accomplished actor, most recently appearing as a corporate espionage agent in Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity and as a plagiarizing journalist in The Wire. Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a political science professor at…
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Desperate to Be Liked: Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited
Director Julian Jarrold’s lavish period piece Brideshead Revisited trots the globe like a genteel James Bond adventure, visiting London, Venice, and Morocco, but especially the opulent Castle Howard. From the perspective of an ignoramus that hasn’t read Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel, this compressed version of what I imagine to be a grander prose narrative doesn’t…
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Kate Winslett evokes emotional illiteracy in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader
Director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, Billy Elliot), producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, and screenwriter David Hare’s adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader examines evolving notions of German postwar guilt and culpability. Unfolding across three distinct time periods (1958, 1966, and 1995), The Reader hinges on a significant reveal in its middle that recasts…
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A Disease Immune to Bureaucracy: Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness
Director Fernando Meirelles has examined desperate pressure cookers (City of God) and institutional corruption (The Constant Gardener) before. Blindness proves perfect to meld both themes, with a science fiction twist imagining the downfall of civilization itself. Blindness is part of a special subset of the horror/sci-fi/disaster genre: the dystopian end-of-civilization nightmare. Whereas the typical entry…
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On the Run from Johnny Law in Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket
Wes Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson’s feature debut Bottle Rocket is based on their 1992 short film of the same name. Like Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Bottle Rocket may not have turned the world upside down, but is now viewed as a key filmmaker’s ur text. His signature style is already…
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There’s a Corruption in the Force in Gavin O’Connor’s Pride and Glory
Pride and Glory was one of the last New Line Cinema productions made while still a semi-autonomous company, before being eviscerated by parent company Warner Bros. in 2008. For the morbidly curious, Vanity Fair recently related the sad tale in its latest Hollywood issue. Disclaimer: I worked for New Line Cinema through its end times,…
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Believer Meets Skeptic, in The X-Files: I Want to Believe
The first X-Files feature film Fight the Future (1998) was so tightly bound to the complex mythology of the original television series that it was mostly incomprehensible to anyone not already a deeply committed fan. I myself had only seen the odd episode over the years, and as such could barely follow what was going…
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David Byrne, Live at Radio City Music Hall, February 28, 2009
David Byrne and Brian Eno, both long favorites of this blog, collaborated extensively between 1978-1980. Many of these classic albums have passed into the musical canon, most especially Talking Heads’ Remain in Light (1980) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). There are lingering rumors of interpersonal friction, certainly within the four Talking…
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What’s Wrong With Watchmen
I was right to worry. Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie is indeed a sexed-up and dumbed-down shadow of the richly multi-layered graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I’ve already unleashed my pent-up anxieties about the then-forthcoming movie in 10 Reasons the Watchmen Movie Will Suck). Now that the notably long-gestating and troubled production is…
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Ideaspace Boils to Steam in DeZ Vylenz’s The Mindscape of Alan Moore
DeZ Vylenz’s feature-length documentary about the life and work of writer Alan Moore was made in 2003 but not released until 2008. The delay might be easily explained as that of an independent production’s typical struggle for funding, but it’s hard not to guess the timing of this particular film’s lavish release as a deluxe…
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10 Reasons the Watchmen Movie Will Suck
Sorry for the melodramatic title, but be honest, would you have clicked through to this article had I used a more measured headline like “10 Well-Reasoned Arguments to be Mildly Apprehensive the Watchmen Movie May Not Live Up To Expectations”? Consider yourself a true admirer of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel Watchmen (1986)?…
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The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle Part 5: Diary of the Dead
This is not an opinion you’re likely to find anywhere else on the internet, but we are prepared to argue that Diary of the Dead is one of the best of the entire George A. Romero zombie cycle. It sports the best special effects, is the least repetitive or trigger-happy, and is a welcome return…