reviews

Thank God for the Coen brothers, whose movies always feel like some long-lost classic you’ve just never gotten around to seeing before, full of a wit and a wickedness that’s old-fashioned only in that there’s not much like it to be found these days. The Coens are like a little oasis of grown-up fun in a sea of adolescence that dominates at the movies.

But there’s a rarer magic, too, one that I don’t see so often, one that springs from looking at reality with a fresh eye and finding the magic of discovery in ourselves, like the extraordinary and the ordinary are one and the same. To walk away from a film full of that kind of magic is to feel like we’re part of something secret and mysterious and special just in being alive. To walk away from a film full of that kind of magic is to walk away on air, like you’re lighter and smarter and wiser and more fully human for having seen it.

You know that rude, crude, jerking-off gesture, the one usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes and an ‘Oh, pul-leeze!’ They invented that for Quentin Tarantino. We might have been able to guess — from the way he has seemed, over the last decade, to be everywhere doing nothing, like his mere presence, his mere sneezing on a project, was cause for celebration — how madly in love with himself he is, how much a believer in his own legend he is, but you’d still never be able to imagine how embarrassingly masturbatory *Kill Bill* is.

I mostly can’t stand Jack Black. Wait, strike that — I mostly can’t stand the new Jack Black, the Hollywood Jack Black, the ‘Look, Ma, I’m a movie star!’ Jack Black. He used to have a sort of scary-geek intensity, like as the obsessed fan in *Bob Roberts* and the morality-challenged computer nerd in *Enemy of the State* — studio films, sure, but in supporting roles he had a lot more latitude: to be weird, to be prickly, to be unlikable.

It’s like one of those Florida noir books written by, oh, Carl Hiassen or someone, all rain and lightning and oppressive humidity and double-crossing dames and fishing off the end of piers and cold beers and murder and frame-ups and laid-back cops, only it’s a movie, with golden cinematography like the sun’s forever setting and the sweat glistening sexily on the double-crossing dames and the twists and the turns that keep you on the edge of your seat and munching your popcorn happily as you laugh nervously through the suspenseful bits. It’s a corker of a flick, this one.

Revered anime filmmaker Satoshi Kon’s latest film has been critically acclaimed at film festivals around the world, and there’s little wonder why. Delightfully warm and unexpectedly, deeply humanistic, this is an excellent introduction for the curious to the specifically Japanese animation genre that’s neither too culturally alien nor too geekily science fictional (as anime has … more…

Dreary, tedious, and mean-spirited. And those are its good points. Two smug yuppies with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement buy a beautiful Brooklyn brownstone dirt cheap, and never imagine that the small catch — the unevictable tenant in the upstairs apartment — will turn out to be the old lady from hell (Eileen Essel). If … more…

You had me at hello, Mr. The Rock. You lost me later, sure, though it’s more the movie itself that lost me, not you yourself per se. But with the knowing twinkle in your eye that starts twinkling knowingly right at the outset and never stops, and the sly grin dazzling with all those supernaturally white teeth and the not-taking-this-too-seriously thing, you had me right then. The vibe works, the big-dumb-lug with smarts, with wit, with an inkling of class, with a surprising lightness and limberness that should be at odds with your imposing physical presence but isn’t.

It’s like if Bob Vila made a thriller: ‘Booga booga booga! Be careful which house you choose to renovate– Ooo, look at that beautiful original 19th-century molding!’ Some spoiled rotten yuppies decide they’re fed up with the big city and chuck it all to move to the country, which is never a good idea under the best of circumstances and goes especially horribly wrong here. Which is kinda metaphoric for the movie as a whole, too — movies about arrogant city slickers rubbing the countryfolk the wrong way are rarely a good idea, and here particularly so.