Month: October 2003

Cate Blanchett is a goddess. So beautiful that you just want to fall at her feet and weep, sure, but the talent. My god, the talent. This is her bestest, stunningest, most remarkably surefooted performance ever, but I think I’ve said that about each of her previous roles, I’ll probably say that about the next one, too, and the one after that, and the one after that.

The one time I tried to read a John Grisham book, I had to throw it aside with great force, like Dorothy Parker would have done. Man, is the guy a lousy prose stylist, or what? But his books make great movies for the same reason they sell so well: he tells highly entertaining stories. Completely preposterous stories, true, but highly entertaining ones nevertheless.

Guys, get a clue. If you don’t typically have a lot of luck with the ladies and now a woman you’ve never met before who is suspiciously hot and apparently psychotic disrobes before you and invites you to fuck her, this is an indication that you should run.

Thank God for the Coen brothers, whose movies always feel like some long-lost classic you’ve just never gotten around to seeing before, full of a wit and a wickedness that’s old-fashioned only in that there’s not much like it to be found these days. The Coens are like a little oasis of grown-up fun in a sea of adolescence that dominates at the movies.

But there’s a rarer magic, too, one that I don’t see so often, one that springs from looking at reality with a fresh eye and finding the magic of discovery in ourselves, like the extraordinary and the ordinary are one and the same. To walk away from a film full of that kind of magic is to feel like we’re part of something secret and mysterious and special just in being alive. To walk away from a film full of that kind of magic is to walk away on air, like you’re lighter and smarter and wiser and more fully human for having seen it.

You know that rude, crude, jerking-off gesture, the one usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes and an ‘Oh, pul-leeze!’ They invented that for Quentin Tarantino. We might have been able to guess — from the way he has seemed, over the last decade, to be everywhere doing nothing, like his mere presence, his mere sneezing on a project, was cause for celebration — how madly in love with himself he is, how much a believer in his own legend he is, but you’d still never be able to imagine how embarrassingly masturbatory *Kill Bill* is.

I mostly can’t stand Jack Black. Wait, strike that — I mostly can’t stand the new Jack Black, the Hollywood Jack Black, the ‘Look, Ma, I’m a movie star!’ Jack Black. He used to have a sort of scary-geek intensity, like as the obsessed fan in *Bob Roberts* and the morality-challenged computer nerd in *Enemy of the State* — studio films, sure, but in supporting roles he had a lot more latitude: to be weird, to be prickly, to be unlikable.

It’s like one of those Florida noir books written by, oh, Carl Hiassen or someone, all rain and lightning and oppressive humidity and double-crossing dames and fishing off the end of piers and cold beers and murder and frame-ups and laid-back cops, only it’s a movie, with golden cinematography like the sun’s forever setting and the sweat glistening sexily on the double-crossing dames and the twists and the turns that keep you on the edge of your seat and munching your popcorn happily as you laugh nervously through the suspenseful bits. It’s a corker of a flick, this one.