The remote, reclusive Terrence Malick occupies a most unusual position in American cinema as a kind of living anachronism, an artist practicing in a complicated, highly collaborative, labor intensive medium who behaves like some solitary, tormented genius from an earlier time. After making two highly praised films, Badlands(1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), he lapsed […]
Movies
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Nobody’s looking at you
While our gentile ancestors were gorging on salt pork and flaunting the tops of their heads, the Chosen People were reportedly very busy. In a speech dating from 2003, the now former Prime Minister of Malaysia claims that our Jewish forebears “invented socialism, communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to […]
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Doomed love is the only love that lasts
Despite the sea of schlock that surrounds the subject, all of the best and most famous stories of great romances testify to the essential impossibility of anything like a lasting love. The common thread winding through all those tales — of Héloise and Abélard, Lancelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet — suggests that the only […]
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Don’t call it what it is
“Most Americans hate gay people” according to Jeffrey, a Hollywood suit played by Campbell Scott (The Exorcism of Emily Rose). As Craig Lucas’s filmmaking debut The Dying Gaul opens, the unctuous Jeffrey is doing his best to convince an unsuccessful screenwriter named Robert (Peter Sarsgaard, Jarhead) to straighten up his characters in order to get […]
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The last of the red hot lovers
At least one new film should console those myriads of viewers who frequently complain about Hollywood that “they don’t make movies like they used to.” As Casanova demonstrates, apparently, in fact, they do. The picture actually owes so much to so many works that precede it that it resembles dozens of other movies from the […]
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A new cowboy in the new West
Among all the usual blockbusters depending for their success on the latest in technology, monsters, and publicity, the movie generating the loudest buzz this season, surprisingly, is a relatively small and decidedly unspectacular story of an extended love affair between two cowboys. Most of the commentary surrounding Brokeback Mountain predictably focuses on the fact of […]
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Only kidding about the roses
Maybe aloof simplicity isn’t such a bad idea: Cillian Murphy in “Breakfast on Pluto.”
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Vengeance is theirs
Probably the first public act of modern terrorism on a truly global stage took place a generation ago in Munich, when an armed group of young Palestinians representing a hitherto unknown organization called Black September raided the Olympic Village and kidnapped and murdered eleven members of the Israeli team. Because ABC televised the games and […]
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Going through ‘The Ringer’ and looking ahead
Believe it or not, there are still a few sacred cows roaming Hollywood pastures, subjects that are not yet (and may never be) eligible for mockery. The Holocaust immediately springs to mind, as does 9/11, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will most likely make that list. And it’s usually inappropriate to make light of […]
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Best or bust: the year in review
Maybe it’s just me, but 2005 seemed like a really mediocre year for movies. As a matter of fact, when charged with making a Top Ten list, my mind went completely blank trying to think of films that I especially dug (except for Number 1). So compiling a Best of the Year was more difficult […]
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Moving works of art
I was poking around Fabrics & Findings the other day when I overheard one woman say to her coworker, “And a 45-year-old white guy wrote it!” Further eavesdropping confirmed that they were talking about Arthur Golden’s bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha, and since its publication in 1997 critics and readers have all marveled at the […]
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The big ape’s evolution?
One of the greatest movies of the greatest decade in American film, the original King Kong addresses not only its own time, but perhaps all time — beyond its importance in the art of motion pictures, the great ape haunts the imagination, dwarfing all the other monsters in the crowded population of movie creatures. The […]
