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This is what, the 18,562,012th film version of Jane Austen? How many times can Lizzie Bennet and Mr. Darcy misunderstand each other and yearn and burn and fail to see past their own snobbery and stubbornness until they finally do? Oh my god, do we really need another *Pride & Prejudice*?
I knew nothing about *A History of Violence* before I sat down to watch it, absolutely nothing except that it starred Viggo Mortensen, and that that was enough to make me want to see it. I had even managed to avoid hearing that this was a David Cronenberg film, knowledge that certainly would have colored my expectations about it, as would have the knowledge, which I did not have until just before the movie began, that this was based on a graphic novel.
It’s from Sam Mendes, who gave us the somber Road to Perdition and the blackly funny American Beauty, so don’t expect “Flight of the Valkyries” and stuff blowing up real good… unless you expect the tropes of military movies to be deployed with knowing irony. Based on the book by U.S. Marine sniper Anthony Swofford … more…
Casualty-of-the-streets turned rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson makes his screen debut… playing a casualty-of-the-streets turned rapper. He’s got mojo enough to hold the screen, but he cannot overcome the tedious sense that we’ve seen this all before, nor can the film’s sober intentions overcome the feeble, lifeless script. All of which class the film as … more…
Is it too much of a stretch to say that *Chicken Little* perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the moment: ‘Holy crap, the sky really *is* falling, and we were idiots not to have noticed all along’? Cuz the little guy here is right — there were no WMDs, and there never were. Er, I mean, the sky is indeed dropping down around his little world, even the first time he said as much. He was never, to mix some fairy-tale metaphors, crying wolf, and is it his fault if no one believed him?
You remember the old Veterans’ Day TV marathons for polio research that Lanny Morris and Vince Collins used to host, don’t you? You know, the two Rat Packers who made those great buddy comedies, where Vince was the priggish straight man and Lanny was the hilarious drunk? No? And then there was that scandal with the dead girl in their hotel suite? No? Not ringing a bell?
It’s something close to a stroke of genius that once-wunderkind screenwriter Shane Black sought out Robert Downey Jr. to star in his directorial debut. Not because Downey is so achingly sublime an actor and so funkily charismatic a screen presence that it near to makes you want to weep with despair at what brilliance we’ve missed from him over the years during which he wasn’t able to keep his shit together — though he certainly does give us one of the most deliciously shivery-great performances so far this year in *Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.*
His novel *Breakfast at Tiffany’s* was banned in the little town of Holcomb, in the ass end of Kansas, when Truman Capote went there in late 1959 to investigate the brutal murders of a local farm family. It’s not a fact that *Capote* makes a big deal out of — it’s just sort of slipped in sideways in an interesting revelation about one of the locals — but it’s a tidbit that keeps niggling at the back of my mind. The irony of it, you know: Capote was so moved by the short article in *The New York Times* about the murders, reading in his brownstone in Brooklyn, that he went to Holcomb before the crime was even solved, determined to write about the dead family and the impact the killings had on the close-knit town… a town that had already decided that he was a peddlar of bad influence and inappropriate attitudes.
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