Already obsolete, last decade’s financially successful Bourne trilogy–The Bourne  Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy, (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum, (2007)–needed re-booting to suit the new administration’s political pragmatism (the persistence of foreign policies and espionage strategies once deemed unpopular). But the series’ awful rote cynicism (characterizing ruthless, degenerate American identity) was powered by Bush-hatred more than
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Ads for the new Will Ferrell film The Campaign use the tagline “May the Best Loser Win”–a reference to its plot about two political buffoons running for public office. Ferrell plays North Carolina’s incumbent Congressman Cam Brady and Zach Galifianakis plays his challenger, local tour director Marty Huggins. The cynicism of that ad takes for
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Citizen Kane or Vertigo, which is more fun? Now that Sight & Sound’s decadal critics poll has given the #1 spot to Vertigo, toppling Citizen Kane (to #2), it confirms that film culture as we used to know it has toppled as well. Citizen Kane held sway as the “Greatest Film Of All Time” for so long that a lot of people
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Now that Sight & Sound’s decadal critics poll has given the #1 spot to Vertigo, toppling Citizen Kane (to #2), it confirms that film culture as we used to know it has toppled as well. Citizen Kane held sway as the “Greatest Film Of All Time” for so long that a lot of people began
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Combing the richness of his 2003 father-son film Together and the Chinese historical legend of his 2009 film The Promise, Chen Kaige creates a stirring, fascinating story of family and national heritage in Sacrifice. The personal drama moves into Shakespearean-paced royal intrigue; and time-shifting edits by Derek Hui bounce from the mysterious psychological obsessions of
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The Christopher Nolan Batman movies are not exactly life affirming, so why do pundits refuse to connect those films to last week’s Aurora, Colorado, massacre at the midnight showing of Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises? Instead, the problem of the films themselves has been swept away by a torrent of political distraction over gun control.
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A better movie than The Dark Knight Rises would invite discussion of its content, but interpretation (“What’s that?” say Avengers fans) isn’t even required of this third entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise. A film of empty spectacle, its actual content (formulaic violence, humorless dialogue, unvarying solemnity) runs second to the blatant process of supplying
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How Internet fanaticism over The Dark Knight Rises overtakes film culture Already, The Dark Knight Rises has caused movie media to embarrass itself. Those front page headlines in both the Daily News (four stars) and New York Post (four stars) are heralds of film journalism’s decline into boosterism. It’s happened before and will happen again.
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The fact that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 Singin’ in the Rain was later to inspire art as different from itself and as unignorable as both Michael Jackson’s Black or White music video and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange suggests that maybe, as legend would have it, it really is the greatest movie-musical of
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by Armond White Margaret’s DVD and Dust Bunnies attempt to rescue the elite Advance word on the DVD release of Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret hailed it as a “masterpiece” yet no one calls it a good movie because it isn’t even that. It’s the latest event from our era’s perverse herd mentality. A group of media cronies with
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