film criticism by maryann johanson | celebrating 25 years: 1997–2022
Devoid of personality and soul, this hellish Frankenstein monster of processed entertainment product wallows in a stew of borrowed ideas and imagery and does absolutely nothing fresh with them.
Absolutely delightful and utterly original, with its lovingly crafted stop-motion animation bursting with sweetness but also with a winking mockery. I have just a few caveats…
Appalling and sadistic. How can anyone who is not a sociopath look at this horrible attempt at feel-good fantasy and say, “This is fine, this is healthy”?
It’s all a bit satirical. Or maybe not. Look, over there, Shakespeare in a superhero cape!
Now with winners indicated.
The Online Film Critics Society is one of the orgs for which I help choose year-end best-ofs.
This is Bourne fan fiction. But it’s the rare sort of good fanfic: utterly inconsequential, of course, but a whole lotta fun. It’s a turn-your-brain-off popcorn flick for people who don’t like to turn our brains off just because we’re at The Movies.
Zulaikha was all like, “I am surprised that Edward Norton didn’t make it to the list!” and I was all like, “That can’t be,” but it can be, so time to rectify that.
Oh yeah, I’m late with this. I carefully gather them all year long and then I never get around to posting them. So here they are at long last. And for 2011, I’m just gonna post ’em as they come in. So there.
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’?
