For Your Consideration movie review: unpretty comedy
Christopher Guest and his merry band of pranksters are back, improvising a loving, teasing romp through a realm we love and love to hate, full of people fascinating and repellent at the same time.
Oscars
Joyeux Noël (aka Merry Christmas) movie review: a terrible peace
Dramatizes a bizarre moment in time with a straightforward aplomb that is devastating. You wish you could laugh at the insanity of it but the only emotional response is overwhelming rage and grief.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (review)
It’s probably very much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, if you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex where you take the train down from London and someone meets you at a station that’s called a ‘halt’ and you don’t think murder is all that bad as long as the mystery of it is solved by a gentleman who has his manservant dress him for dinner. Cuz the Wallace & Gromit claymation toons have always been very much about both celebrating and sending up the peculiar British character, and you have to recognize it as a bit silly and a bit of an exaggeration that was never really real anyway but still completely love and embrace it nevertheless to really get the warmth and affection with which they — the Wallace & Gromit toons, that is — are offered for your entertainment.
best performances of 2004: ready for their closeup…
BEST ACTOR Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda It’s a role that, in the hands of even another very competent actor, could have descended into pathos and sentimentality, but Cheadle’s performance goes way beyond mere competence: As an Oskar Schindler-type figure in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, he approaches incomprehensible horrors in a way that makes us intimate partners … more…
Tribeca ’03: Girlhood (review)
How often must we hear the same story over and over again before someone in a position to do something about it starts to listen? Oscar-nominated documentarian Liz Garbus relates a familiar tale — of horrible sexual abuse and parental neglect and indifference from the justice system — with a shocking, powerful intimacy that’s a … more…
Seabiscuit (review)
The music swells over the moment of victory, tears run freely down my face, fade to black, movie over. And I want to sob even longer and harder. Usually the rolling credits and the lights coming up in this kind of situation means a letup in the girly crying, but not this time. There’s something else going on besides the usual Oscar-baiting, triumph-of-the-human-and-equine-spirit shrink-wrapped Gourmet Film.
Finding Nemo (review)
*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.
A Beautiful Mind (again) (review)
So whaddaya know? Ron Howard and Russell Crowe rode the short bus all to the way to the Oscars by playing the ‘we made a sensitive film about the mentally ill’ card. Which is complete crap, of course. *A Beautiful Mind* is pure made-for-Hollywood pap about the mentally ill in which schizophrenia is treated by Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman the way doctors used to treat it in the bad old days before we (some of us, anyway) were enlightened about diseases of the brain: Hey, snap out of it! Get over it! It’s all in your head!
Spirited Away movie review: dream world
As soft and strange as a dream, *Spirited Away* is like all the wonderful children’s books that fired my imagination as a kid, before my head got saturated by fantasy clichés and almost anything could surprise and delight and startle me.
Chicago (review)
Their *Chicago* — based on the stage musical by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse — is utterly singable, danceable, cheerable, with musical numbers that straddle the unwillingness of today’s movie audiences to suspend our disbelief about movie characters breaking into song unless they’re Disney lions or talking candelabra.
