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There’s a little bit of Hammer horror in Julie Taymor’s messy but thrilling adaptation of Shakespeare’s last play, and there’s more than a little turning-of-the-tables, all of which brings a new perspective on the play, and a new appreciation for it, which is the best we can ask for the umpteenth adaptation of a centuries-old work.
It keeps us on our intellectual and emotional toes as it blithely bounces us around thorny philosophical koans and lets us peek behind the scenes of the universe at the charming puppetmasters who pull the strings. But for the heaviness of the film’s metaphysics, there is something ineffably light and charming about it. If Frank Capra made The Matrix, it would be The Adjustment Bureau.
High school is hard. High school is even harder when you’re a secret alien from another planet in hiding from big scary guys with enormous feet and weird tattoos on their bald heads who are after you for reasons no one really understands. Except maybe that you’re the last of your kind. Well, apart from your alien-warrior protector, who isn’t specially numbered like you are.
It’s garden gnomes… in love… even though they’re supposed to hate each other! It’s funny cuz they’re plaster lawn decorations and say things like “Let’s kick some grass!” and have a plastic pink flamingo pal with a funny generic South American accent who gives them wise advice about romance.
Call this a thriller of emotional suspense, and one that’s wickedly unsettling, in which we’re never sure who’s feeling what, or why, or to what extremes they’re capable of going.
Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa graduate to writer-directors here, and give us a warmly human and hugely funny story that’s almost a sendup of both prison melodramas and hetero romantic comedies… yet is also a truly amorous and very satisfying tale about the extremes to which a man will go for love.
There’s solid workmanship and an authentic emotional muscle in this movie. I was startled to find myself overwhelmed, eventually, by its ragged charms and its rough-edged vision of female power and pain.
Doctor Who has been doing amazing things with TV since 2005, but this may be the best example yet of how gonzo and how simultaneously emotionally satisfying TV can be these days.
If you’ve been possessed of a burning desire to behold Jack Black’s belly flab in 3D, then I am delighted to announce that your moment has arrived. What’s that? You say it’s Black’s buttcrack you crave the sight of, rendered in three glorious dimensions? This, my friend, is your lucky day.
I’d really like to give writer-director James L. Brooks the benefit of the doubt here, because I think — as I usually don’t about asinine romantic comedies — that he means well. He simply doesn’t seem to realize that pathologically messed up characters are neither cute nor charming.
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