Award-worthy performances by, in order, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams are backed by a supporting cast reminiscent of Mystic River or any of the growing Lehane/Affleck oeuvre. Unfortunately, for a boxing movie, the plot telegraphs its every punch. We know what’s coming; our only interest is in seeing how it gets there. Matt […]
Britain’s National Theatre production starring Rory Kinnear was broadcast in Hahn Hall as part of UCSB’s Arts and Lectures series and disappointed for two reasons. One was that I couldn’t understand half the dialogue and Hamlet’s s’s and f’s sounded like lisps. One is more forgiving of live theater, but when it is a prerecorded presentation […]
How do you make a movie interesting when it is about one man stuck in a pit for, apparently, 127 hours, especially when we know when and how he gets out? I am still wondering, after watching this film by Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire. I admit to not watching it all, as the […]
While inclined going in to treat this as a throwaway film, Anne Hathaway’s bare-it-all performance was so compelling that I was mesmerized right up to the cliche of an ending. Jake Gyllenhaal’s low-key charm was also easy on the eyes and mind, seducing the viewer along with every woman onscreen. The corporate shenanigans verged on Up […]
As with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, I knew everything that was going to happen, so much of the pleasure was in seeing how familiar events and people were portrayed. The best example: there was no need to introduce the Karl Rove character; director Doug Liman merely had to put a fat, jowly […]
A very skillful adaptation of the book, with only Dr. Teleborian disappointing my mental image. One wonders how someone who had not read the book would appreciate, or follow, the complex story, but then again there probably aren’t many people who fall in that category. For those of us who had read it, it was fun […]
The only interest for me was the cross-cultural view of the life of the Chinese factory worker, and its evidence of why they are making our blue jeans for us. The family story went nowhere in particular, and the contrast between city and country life was unconvincing: if life in the country was so much […]
A casually clever countryside caper, the kind the British do so well, mostly about love – or is it sex? There are no car crashes – albeit a stampede of cows – and no patent absurdities – albeit a number of stretches. There are, however, a number of fun characters, all gracefully identified in cameo […]
Unfortunatley overhyped, this expose of the 2008 financial crisis told us nothing we hadn’t already learned from Michael Lewis’s more insightful The Big Short. It wasted its skewers on academics, who were hardly major culprits, and the talking heads who provided the story line were mainly people we’d never heard of, whose legitimacy was never […]
This had more the feeling of a short story – by O.Henry, say – than the movie equivalent of a novel. Not because it was short, which it was, but because it offered a slice of life, a la Woody Allen, without reaching any conclusions. Yes, it was a comment on the human condition, full […]
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