I sat through 65 minutes without finding a scene that was either believable or likable. I once thought George Clooney could do no wrong, but here he’s done nothing right, from casting to acting to plot to tone. The famous actors, with the possible exception of Cate Blanchett, just play themselves and you wonder what […]
That only leaves Barbara, to which I have somewhat tentatively assigned the top spot on my list. It is not powerful, or surprising or innovative. But when I left the theater I felt I had seen an almost perfect movie.
Bruce Dern plays a Midwestern Lear in the role of a lifetime (I know, because I saw his other career highlights in a Film Festival tribute the next day) and June Squibb is an Oscar-worthy match for Jennifer Lawrence in an uncannily similar role; but what most intrigued me was the son, played uncomfortably by […]
Notes from the Tribute Evenings at the 2014 Santa Barbara International Film Festival January 30, David O. Russell: I didn’t “get” I Heart Huckabees when it came out, and apparently I wasn’t alone. David O. Russell seemed almost willing to disown it, saying his life was at a bad point when he directed it and […]
This had everything Quentin Tarantino could want in a movie – suspense, outrageous gore, great characters and humor everywhere – which is presumably why he calls it the best movie of the year. The plot contains just enough ambiguity to keep you guessing, and the shocker of an ending either explains it all or leaves […]
Purest hokum. Every president since Ike and every civil rights moment since Brown v. Board of Education is seen through the eyes of a White House butler, and in order to compress them all, plus the growth of the Black Power movement, into the space of this movie, there’s not much room for subtlety or […]
This movie crept up on me. Watching on an airplane, I couldn’t make out some dialogue, and nothing much out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. The character of Oscar continued to build. Yes, he was a bit of a fuck-up: he cheated on his girl, he was hotheaded, he was fired from his […]
I can’t think of a single credible, or logical, scene in the entire movie. So, okay, take it on its own absurdist terms, and it was pretty funny. The trouble, though, for me at least, was that this was based on real events and real people and a real business, which made it hard to […]
Frankly, I got a little tired of full-screen shots of Joaquin Phoenix’s face. They admirably conveyed his every thought and feeling, but his thoughts and feelings weren’t particularly interesting. What interest there was lay in Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied voice, a personal OS that provided Theodore’s love interest. Hearing Her develop a personality that reflected His […]
A searing portrait of contemporary Chinese society, not always comprehensible to a Westerner, although violence is a fairly universal language. The separate stories are marginally related, enough that you feel it is one society you are seeing; and the protagonists are similarly social misfits or outcasts, who all, in different ways, want a better life […]
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