In The Descendants, Matt King (George Clooney) at one point has this to say (in voiceover, for about 3,000% of the dialogue in the first half of the movie is in voiceover): “Somehow it feels natural to find a daughter of mine on a different island. My family seems exactly like an archipelago – all […]
There was every reason on earth to assume that J. Edgar was going to be bad or horrible: it is an Oscar season biopic, and that is absolutely never a good sign, directed by Clint Eastwood, a filmmaker with a one-size-fits-all aesthetic, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor who hasn’t done anything to seriously challenge […]
Martin Scorsese has always been at his best when he’s challenging himself the most, and that is why Hugo always seemed like a great idea for him even though it was completely weird: a big-budget 3-D family movie with a child protagonist, set in a magical realism version of Paris around 1930. The good news […]
It being Thanksgiving weekend, and thus the time of year for being thankful, I figured I would at long last express my gratitude towards the last three contributors to the Carry On Campaign, who all requested an essay that I was unable to achieve in a timely fashion for one reason or another. The first […]
That The Muppets would be first and above all a nostalgia trip was probably to be expected; that it would be so very little else besides is a faint disappointment at least, though the fact that it is, after all, the Muppets we’re talking about takes some of the sting out – if you’re going […]
The confession first: I enjoy The Muppets Take Manhattan more than it deserves: it is not, in any meaningful way, a better film than The Great Muppet Caper (Frank Oz, directing solo for the first time, can’t match Jim Henson’s easy shifting between moods in that picture, but he’s more adept with the camera), and […]
“[Actor] doesn’t play [Celebrity], they become [Celebrity]” is one of the most redoubtable and lazy tools in the critic’s handbag, sure to come up anytime a new biopic is in the offing. All of us, I think, have fallen into the trap here or there because it’s an easy and sincere thing to say about […]
Happy Feet Two isn’t really all that horrible, as animated sequels to musical adventure-comedies about animals that talk like television addicts go; but there’s nothing much about that genre that inspires confidence even at the best of times, and besides the which, it has the unfortunate task of following the original Happy Feet, a beautifully-designed […]
The Great Muppet Caper is perhaps the most Muppet-ish of the Muppet movies; not the best, for it is not as funny as The Muppet Movie, nor as full of heart, nor as nuanced in its dismantling of the fourth wall. But it gets the Muppet-ness of the characters more than The Muppet Movie, and […]
It’s precisely three shots into The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 that Taylor Lautner takes his shirt off, and in all honesty I don’t suppose that there can possibly be a more legitimate justification for seeing the movie. Actually, the shocking thing about Breaking Dawn 1 is that, after three years and four […]
The Muppets, taken in the broadest sense, predate by a considerable margin the 1976 debut of The Muppet Show, (Kermit the Frog himself first appeared all the way back in 1955) but it was with that marvelously off-kilter parody of/homage to the ossified traditions of vaudeville and the variety show that Jim Henson’s ingenious puppetry […]
The fatigue that had settled on John Hughes at the turn of the 1990s oozed into its cruelest form with Beethoven, a family comedy about a wacky & destructive St. Bernard that is totally without any merit whatsoever. It is not, in the main, a film of tremendous importance in cinema generally, nor in Hughes’s […]
