Month: October 2005

Good Night, and Good Luck. (review)

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Are you now, or have you ever been, a journalist? That’s what *Good Night, and Good Luck.* feels like, a smooth, sardonic smack in the face of today’s so-called newspeople, the cinematic equivalent of a withering glare and a disdainful roll of the eyes. Oh, this is an angry movie, calm and collected on the surface and seethed with reeled-in rage underneath. Yeah, it’s about Edward R. Murrow and how he took on McCarthy’s insanity, but what it’s really about is how we need a Murrow now and is there no one, not one supposed journalist, with the balls to take up Murrow’s mantle of integrity and honesty and fearlessness?

The Brothers Grimm and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (review)

The thing I really love about Terry Gilliam is how fearless he is. His movies are glorious hodgepodges of everything that fascinates and scares him, and he just keeps cramming anxieties and audacities and myths and symbols and jokes and tassels and cherries on top until you just about can’t breathe anymore and you hardly know where to look onscreen and you have to get let it wash over you, this cinematic *experience.* Or not. Gilliam doesn’t seem to care about box office, which is good, because the box office doesn’t seen to care for him, too often (*The Brothers Grimm* hasn’t even yet earned back half its budget).

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (review)

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It’s probably very much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, if you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex where you take the train down from London and someone meets you at a station that’s called a ‘halt’ and you don’t think murder is all that bad as long as the mystery of it is solved by a gentleman who has his manservant dress him for dinner. Cuz the Wallace & Gromit claymation toons have always been very much about both celebrating and sending up the peculiar British character, and you have to recognize it as a bit silly and a bit of an exaggeration that was never really real anyway but still completely love and embrace it nevertheless to really get the warmth and affection with which they — the Wallace & Gromit toons, that is — are offered for your entertainment.

Shortcuts

These reviews have moved — sorry for the inconvenience. Domino Everything Is Illuminated Flightplan Into the Blue Lost: The Complete First Season The Muppet Show: Season One Oliver Twist The Pippi Longstocking Collection Roll Bounce Thumbsucker Two for the Money An Unfinished Life