It’ll be interesting to see how audiences who haven’t read Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s 2001 novel respond to director Ang Lee’s vision of the colorful tale. Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel is a twice-strangely-monikered, religiously insatiable 16-year-old Indian boy immigrating by freighter from Pondicherry to Canada with his parents, brother and the animal inhabitants of their...
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At numerous points in the watching of Lincoln, Steven Spielburg’s new ode to America and Americana, I was reminded of Tableau Vivant, a kind of staged group charades that was a popular entertainment of the 19th century. In Tableau Vivant, costumed enactors wordlessly enact a story, freezing in a series of familiar scenes or attitudes. And so...
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If it weren’t for the fact that writer/director Martin McDonagh is every bit as handsome as his favorite leading man, you’d think he was going down the Woody Allen vanity route, casting Colin Farrell as his obvious surrogate—a screenwriter named Marty M—in his second feature film, Seven Psychopaths. Fellow Irishman Farrell was also the star...
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I should be a millionaire right now. Thirty-five minutes into this purported suburban romantic comedy, I muttered to my companion, “I’ll bet you a million dollars this movie was written by a couple of middle aged guys.” Fifty-five long minutes later the movie was finally over and there were the writer credits: Ian Helfer...
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The beloved former Central Park Zoo denizens and their Antarctic penguin friends who comprise the billion dollar Madagascar franchise are back, this time in 3D. As if that’s not enough to ensure a colorful, frenzied, 3D good time, they land (in the chimps’ plane) in Monte Carlo, and join up with the circus. The...
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War has been said to be 99% tedium interspersed with 1% pure terror. And so it is with pregnancy, childbirth and baby rearing, only thankfully (else who would do it?), in these pursuits there are also intervals of intense joy. Perhaps appropriately then, something akin to this ratio of tedium to pain and pleasure...
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From the blowsy, cutesy, painfully unfunny trailer for this film, I went into the screening with eyes half averted, dreading the sight of some of my favorite British film actors pandering to the elderly art film audience in a mawkishly feel-good contrivance. And while there’s mawkishness, to be sure, as well as feel-good contrivance,...
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Watching Damsels in Distress, director Whit Stillman’s much anticipated first feature in thirteen years, was for me something akin to seeing an old college flame again after a similar interval. The old charms, about which one had been so wild—in Stillman’s case, the characters’ earnest dialogue, which flows in uncharacteristically complete, literary and erudite...
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Director Lasse Hallstrom (best known for My Life as a Dog and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) is a man unafraid of heartwarming, and his latest, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is shameless. The big fish tale of a romantic, mystical Yemeni sheikh (the gorgeous Egyptian actor Amr Waked, last seen as Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law...
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Jeff is a jobless 30-year-old slacker man-child who does indeed live in the basement of his mother’s house. He is an expert at marijuana smoke rings, daytime television and pickup basketball but whines and protests when asked to perform a simple household errand for his mother (a wonderful Susan Sarandon). Lost and paralyzed, he...
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