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Oh, it’s totally a chick flick: there’s all sorts of stuff about shoes, and there will be some happy tears at the end. But it’s the good kind of chick flick, about real women with real problems that other real women can identify with.
Funny? Sure, *Lord of War* is funny. Funny like how you’re not sure whether that headline is from Reuters or The Onion. Funny like how Jon Stewart has to insist that what he’s about to tell you really happened and is not the invention of his team of political wagsters. Satirical? Sure, *Lord of War* is satirical. Satirical like the front page of *The New York Times* is satirical. Satirical like how, at the end of Andrew Niccol’s black comedy about a relatively small-time freelance arms dealer, he tells us that the biggest arms dealers in the world are the nations that are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Family: It’s what Thanksgiving is all about, isn’t it? I mean, besides the waiting for the arrival of Santa to wrap up the Macy’s parade in the morning and the gorging in the afternoon and the massive cleanup in the evening.
That teaser trailer — you know the one I’m talking about — with the fat old ex-superhero struggling to get into his spandex costume? It left such a bad taste in my mouth whenever I contemplated the film that must go with it. I imagined a gang of former masked crusaders called out of happy retirement, reluctantly huffing and puffing their way back into action, replete with very unfunny cracks about getting fat and old, and probably with an even more unfunny getting-into-shape-a-la-*Rocky* sequence thrown in for good measure.
Nora Ephron’s delightful film is perhaps the epitome of the modern romantic comedy to which many a movie has aspired and few have even approached in its warmth, naturalness, and genuine spirit of amour.
You know me. You know I hate romantic comedies, mostly. You know I think they tend to be phony, they tend to show off the worst sides of both men and women, and they tend to be neither romantic nor comedic. So you gotta be suspecting that a film billed as ‘the ultimate romantic comedy’ would have me running screaming in opposite direction as if my life depending upon escape.
Bruce Campbell makes me laugh just looking at him. Just thinking about him. But I never thought he’d almost make me cry. And I certainly never thought he’d almost make me cry in a movie called Bubba Ho-Tep.
Oh, great day in the glorious sunshiny Tuscany morning! A movie about a woman that actual women will be able to identify with, one that’s fantastical enough to be diverting and down-to-earth enough to let us recognize ourselves in it.
*Finding Nemo* is stunningly exquisite, an extraordinary leap forward in artistry for Pixar, and for computer animation in general, bringing a strange and alien world to life, so real you could almost reach out and touch it, knowing that it would be wet if you did. Truly, *Nemo* is an immersive experience. But only visually. Because the moment all the gorgeously rendered inhabitants of this beautiful undersea realm open their mouths, they sound surprisingly, and rather depressingly, human.
It’s completely predictable and predictably feel-good, but so damn what? This is an utterly delightful flick, not for the least which reason is that it’s about complex, engaging, and realistically flawed young women devoting their lives to something more ambitious than chasing boys and buying cosmetics. London teenage Jesminder (Parminder K. Nagra) lives in a … more…
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