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Well, hooray for a movie about girls doing their own thing. Too bad it’s more like a training-bra of a flick designed to indoctrinate tweens with the estrogen-drenched sappiness of “women’s pop culture” — you know, like Oprah magazine and Lifetime Original movies and Celine Dion ballads — than a story that deals with the … more…
This is it right here, people: the ‘ownership society’ our so-called leaders think we ‘deserve,’ an unregulated, unpoliced Wild West of corporate hegemony. Fraud, greed, arrogance, powermongering? All part of the game, folks, all part of the game. It’s every man for himself, the way God intended, and God help you if you were so fucking stupid that you let yourself be born with anything less than a platinum spoon in your mouth and powerful connections out the wazoo. Cuz most of us are gonna end up serfs if this stuff continues.
Sometimes you want reality from The Movies, and sometimes you just want a big ol’ cartoony popcorny action adventure flick that’s exciting and makes you laugh and doesn’t require deep thinking but also isn’t so stupid that it makes you want to cry. And I got a huge kick out of this one. So there.
Corporations on the Couch Did you know there were water riots in Bolivia in early 2000? Poor urban Bolivians actually took to the streets over water… not because there wasn’t enough to go around but because the American construction and engineering firm Bechtel had taken over the country’s privatized water infrastructure, including — and here’s … more…
Oh, but this is a sucker punch of a movie, harsh and sere and so thoroughly unsentimental that it seems to have active contempt for lesser movies that pander to the audience’s desire to walk out of the theater feeling good and happy and that all is right in the world. This is like winning the lottery and getting hit by a train on your way to cash in your ticket. This is not for anyone who feels the need to escape real life at the multiplex. This *is* real life, as real as film gets. You are warned.
The voice cast of this animated British kid flick is an Anglophile’s dream: Kate Winslet (Finding Neverland), Michael Gambon (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), Juliet Stevenson (Being Julia), Rhys Ifans (Vanity Fair), Jane Horrocks (Chicken Run). Pity that not a one of them distinguishes him- or herself — the voice performances are so … more…
The story of Australian cult figure Kelly — a 19th-century Robin Hood–esque outlaw, child of an underclass of Irish immigrants — is a tricky film, punctuated by bursts of staccato surrealism and bitter humor, hard to love unreservedly but easy to appreciate for its ambition. Heath Ledger (The Order) finds a wary, cautious groove as … more…
“A sound like someone trying not to make a sound.” Four-year-old Ruth (Elle Fanning: Daddy Day Care) isn’t describing the shushed fury consuming the adults around her, but she might well be. Her parents’ marriage is collapsing, quietly and at long last, the strain of life-altering tragedy finally catching up to them, but they barely … more…
Compulsively compelling, in the same way that you just can’t help but glance through the Weekly World News while you’re standing online at the supermarket checkout.
The words I keep coming back to, the ones that seem to fit this most astonishing of films best, are ‘terrible’ and ‘awful.’ The old-fashioned senses of the words are what I’m talking about: Peter Jackson has given us a grandly eloquent film that inspires more terror and more awe than anything I’ve seen in a long time. I can compare my reaction to it only with the moviegoing experiences of my childhood, when the hugeness, the all-encompassing-ness of movies in all ways — emotionally, viscerally, visually, aurally — first astounded me, when ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ and Darth Vader’s stormtroopers horrified me to such a degree that I can still feel it.
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