Author Archive

Brokedown Palace, Perfect Blue

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Prison Dames I’ve always had trouble getting into movies about beautiful Americans being brutalized by evil, faceless governments overseas because the movies rarely acknowledge that the Americans aren’t just individuals, but emblems of a rich country’s arrogance, and that their punishment has as much to do wrvation is that while Hollywood likes innocent-American-in-trouble-overseas movies, it
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

Thomas Crown

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

  Rich & Lovely People The Thomas Crown Affair is wealth porn–an advertisement for escapist moviegoing. Every frame is packed with lovely, expensive objects and beautiful people who are rich enough to afford those objects and confident enough to possess them without making a big deal of their acquisition. Pierce Brosnan, who plays billionaire investor
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

Runaway Bride

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Running on Empty Julia Roberts now chooses material that seems designed to play off her public image, and that’s not a bad thing. It shows she’s done some serious thinking about her image and wants to play around with it; she’s turning into the movie star equivalent of Madonna, in that every new project is both a stand-alone piece of
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

Twin Falls Idaho Disappoints

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Siamese Dream For a while, the quirky independent film Twin Falls Idaho is mesmerizing despite the fact that not much is going on, and a lot of the movie’s power comes from the simple image of the two heroes’ faces side by side, whispering in consultation while wearing chocolate-gray hipster suits. It’s a stark, poetic image, and not just because
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

Pups

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

An Important Movie You May Never See We live in a time when independent cinema means midlevel studio pictures those studios can no longer be bothered to make; postmodern genre films that steal from other postmodern genre films; films about posers and street hoods and poser street hoods; films about people who just graduated from college and have to get
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

American Pie, Wild Wild West

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

American Pie directed by Paul and Chris Weitz Humor, Pink & Black American Pie brings new meaning to the phrase “coming of age,” and provides the South Park movie with its only serious competition for the title of Grossest Film of the Summer. A precision-tooled yuk (and yuck) machine designed to pander to teens and teens-at-heart, the film takes the subtext
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

South Park

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

South Park directed by Trey Parker If John Waters circa 1979 made a Walt Disney movie, the result would look a lot like South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut. That’s no idle comparison: One of the most striking things about this freakish, fire-breathing big-screen version of the Comedy Central cartoon series is what a large number of Disney elements it
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

Big Daddy

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

directed by Dennis Dugan Big Baby Toward the end of the new Adam Sandler comedy Big Daddy—and don’t worry, I’m not spoiling any plot developments a dog couldn’t anticipate—the irresponsible fratboy hero’s adorable five-year-old ward climbs into the witness box at a custody hearing and tells the court what he “learned” from the hero. The kid tells the court that
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

Instinct

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Instinct directed by Jon Turtletaub Hopkins’ Macho Misfire In Instinct, 62-year-old Anthony Hopkins plays an ape expert named Ethan Powell, who lived among the mountain gorillas of Rwanda for several years until he went berserk and murdered two Rwandan soldiers for reasons unknown. Now he’s incarcerated in the psycho wing of a maximum security penitentiary, where he remains mute
[ read more... ]

Be the first to comment on this post

..