The Taking of Pelham 123

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Tony Scott’s films start from the premise that Americans are bored—and secretly resentful—of their lives. He specializes in violent, fragmented spectacle that feeds this boredom by drowning out subtlety and complexity. Yet, he’s the good Scott; brother Ridley is merely a pretentious window-dresser of big themes. Tony’s best movies (Spy Games, Domino) match hyperactive style
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Tetro

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Something’s wrong when a Francis Coppola movie inspires equal dread and anticipation. Coppola doesn’t just defy popular appeal, he snubs it. His Tetro is not about the discovery of Tetracycline antibiotics—and that’s the problem. Coppola creeps around his true subject: masculine camaraderie as learned through psychic and genetic history (c.f. his best films, The Godfather
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Land of the Lost

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Between two pitiful Today Show bookend scenes (both featuring Matt Lauer confirming Tom Cruise’s accusation “You’re glib, Matt. You’re glib!”), Land of the Lost sheds its TV-formula origins as a 1970s network series and becomes glib fun. Will Ferrell plays scientist Rick Marshall, who explores “tears in time, quantum paleontology.” Inventing the “Techyon amplifier,” Marshall’s
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Away We Go

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Likable TV actors Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski stress their charm to the limit in Away We Go. As Verona and Burt, an unmarried, mixed-race couple expecting their first child, Rudolph’s warm coloring and freckly, smiling placidity contrasts Krasinki’s lanky, unfazed, big-boy goofiness. They represent an Obama-era ideal, born of the media’s predominant middle-class tenets:
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The Way of Pixarism

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Pixar rules pop media like nothing since mid-20th century General Motors held sway as the preeminent American corporation (and the bane of grassroots individualism). Every Pixar film—including the new Up, gushed over by Cannes Film Festival shills—is greeted with nearly patriotic fervor. This absurdity clarifies contemporary news media’s unprincipled collusion with Hollywood capitalism
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Terminator Salvation

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All Terminator movies are the same: junk. But McG’s Terminator Salvation has an important new element: humanity. In the opening scene, terminally ill scientist Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter) poignantly addresses Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a convicted murderer on Death Row. Her odd request that he donate his organs to science could be sinister,
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The Beautiful and the Damned

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The System rewards Steven Soderbergh and he pays his Faustian debt with haughty judgments. Soderbergh’s new film The Girlfriend Experience is the most unironic celebration of materialist privilege since Woody Allen’s Reagan-era heralds Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. Already proclaimed, even in the alternative media, The Girlfriend Experience paints a gaudy face on the
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A NY State of Cannes

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Martin Scorsese looked a little out of place against the lavish backdrop of the French Riviera, but the crowd was still happy to have him there. Presenting a special restoration of The Red Shoes to an appreciative audience at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival, Scorsese absorbed the spotlight. “We love you, Marty!” someone with a
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Quotidian Perfection

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Foreign-language art films like Jerichow, by German writer-director Christian Petzold, Three Monkeys by Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre come pre-sold with film festival approval. That only means they appeal to the personal preferences of our cultural gatekeepers who predictably dismiss a pop-culture surprise like Next Day Air. Opening without fanfare
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