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‘I wanna kill myself,’ Craig tells the triage nurse. ‘Fill this out,’ she tells him boredly, handing him some paperwork. Yet the film steadfastly refuses to go anywhere near cultural criticism of how we now turn ordinary frustrations and disappointments into medical diagnoses…
It starts out all sad music at momma’s funeral and we gots to sell the horse farm, but dang if nobody can keep Diane Lane down.
Once upon a time, a film this epic, this relevant, this emotional would have been celebrated as a great entertainment and important storytelling with something vital to say about the world today.
There’s a sneaky cheekiness to You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger that is inherent in the slyness of the title, which wraps up in one neat little package ideas about romantic fate, our yearning for something better than the pretty good thing we might already have, and an up-to-the-minute restlessness about our lives that hounds even the most comfortable of us.
Of all the washed-up washed-out over-the-hill too-old-for-this-shit action-hero movies we’ve had thrown at us this year — The A-Team, The Losers, The Expendables — Red is by far the most amusing, the most clever, the most tongue-in-cheek, the most fun (and I say that as someone who mostly liked those other movies).
James Franco’s elucidation of Allen Ginsberg is soaring in its warmth and sincerity. The words are (mostly) the writer’s, but the vitality and the passion are all Franco’s: he makes the poet breathe for us today in a way that feels entirely modern and relevant.
First of all, any movie that kills off the smashing Christina Hendricks in the opening 20 minutes deserves to be shot down on the basis of that alone. But that’s only the tiniest of the many cinematic crimes of Life as We Know It, which pretends to be something hip and fresh and is in fact relentlessly conventional, even retrograde.
The ambitions that Mark Zuckerberg had for Facebook — at least what we see of them in The Social Network — seem so small and sad and deeply ungrand next to the reality of how life on Facebook plays out a mere few years later in the profoundly poignant Catfish.
No, wait: lemme guess what we’re meant to take from this turgid drama of small lives and smaller ambitions. ‘Some people do bad things and go to prison, and some people do bad things and live their lives out in the wide world as if they’re in prison anyway’? ‘Crazy, quietly desperate men are sad and sympathetic, and crazy, aggressively desperate women are slutty objects of derision’?
I’ve come to realize recently that there’s something more chilling, more eerie than a fictional dystopian world: a fictional dystopian world in which no one understands they’re living in a dystopia.
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