Whatever else it may accomplish, the new Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, demonstrates that Hollywood continues to conjugate that popular verb, “meet.” Whatever the claims from the industry and the dutiful hype from the faithful Fidos of the media, the picture positively shouts its origins in some communal cogitation that no doubt concluded with […]
Movies
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Ditching Marilyn to fight a mummy
Anyone remember those old What If comics Marvel used to make that wondered how things might have turned out if certain scenarios had played out differently? I only have two that survived my childhood (“What if Elektra hadn’t died?” and “What if the Thing and the Beast continued to mutate?”), but the idea still seems […]
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East and West, past and future
Whatever else it may accomplish, the new Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, demonstrates that Hollywood continues to conjugate that popular verb, “meet.” Whatever the claims from the industry and the dutiful hype from the faithful Fidos of the media, the picture positively shouts its origins in some communal cogitation that no doubt concluded with […]
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Pop psychiatry with an ax
Beginning with its title, the new horror flick Gothika employs a number of possibly insoluble puzzles to establish its position within its genre and, presumably, to create some additional appeal to audiences. That title, to begin with, is apparently intended as a reference to a long, bloody, and often marvelous history of literature and […]
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Slick Nick, you devil, you
People who write letters to newspapers complaining about nudity, cursing, and anti-Christmas content in Love Actually (Lobsters in the manger scene?Those heathens!)will die if they see Bad Santa (opens Wednesday, November 26). It will literally kill them. Their heads will explode like popcorn kernels, so be careful who you sit near in the theater. They […]
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The professor and the working girl
Along with its satirical and sometimes angry portrait of academic life, Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain, confronts some complicated cultural issues revolving around race and the delicate and often ridiculous notion of political correctness. While adhering to some of the essence of Roth’s book, the film version of the novel mostly touches on those […]
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Shattering your expectations
Back before Jayson Blair, Matt Drudge, and Fox News made America question the legitimacy of their media outlets, a 24-year-old wunderkind named Stephen Glass dealt a staggering blow to the notion of journalistic ethics. It was discovered that the majority of the entertaining and enlightening articles he wrote for a plethora of this country’s most […]
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The end of the line
Although science fiction throughout its history generally deals with such marvelous subjects as robots, space travel, time travel, the future, and our beloved old friends, the bug-eyed monsters (BEMs to the cognoscenti) of the pulp magazines, it also often toys with deeper, darker issues. Investigations of physics often lead to metaphysics; journeys to distant […]
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Avoiding humans, then blowing them up
Have you heard the one about the dwarf, the clinically depressed artist, and the goofy Cuban? It sounds like the setup for the worst joke imaginable, but under the steady hand of debut writer-director Thomas McCarthy, The Station Agent (opens Friday, November 14, at the Little) becomes a leisurely paced character study about three very […]
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Don’t mess with Texas
Devotees of horror recall the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) with that peculiar mixture of terror and delight that distinguishes the genuine student of the form from the mere shudder-seeking dilettante. Though made by virtual unknowns, most of whom, with the exception of its director and co-writer Tobe Hooper, are now forgotten, and on a […]
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’Tis the (early) season
Pieces of April (opens Friday, November 7, at the Little) has two separate storylines that approach each other like a pair of proverbial math-class trains. Train A is a dumpy apartment on the Lower East Side, home to 21-year-old punk-princess April Burns (Katie Holmes) and her new boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke). April, who is like […]
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An epic of love and suffering
Apparently unable to figure out their own motion picture, the writer and director of Beyond Borders, intentionally or not, have produced a reasonably rare specimen, an almost perfectly ambiguous work. The movie constantly alternates subject and style, atmosphere and tone, emotion and theme, in an uncomfortable and generally unsatisfactory rhythm, first attempting one story, one […]
