Author Archive

Jonze/Gondry’s Human Nature

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on April 16, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Serendipity is the word for 1999’s Being John Malkovich, one of the most peculiar, original and profound American comedies since, well, Groundhog Day. On the page, it played like a screwball comedy written by Paddy Chayefsky; it shouldn’t have worked, yet somehow it did. Music video director Spike Jonze shot it like a dark (visually,
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Crush; Oscar Notes

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on April 9, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Movies about women rarely get a fair shake from critics, male or female. In the arenas of both criticism and marketing, a doltish double standard governs any film with the temerity to put a female actress front and center, then build its plot around romance, marriage or other so-called "domestic" concerns. Meanwhile, films about men–particularly
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Hartley’s No Such Thing

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on April 2, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Some filmmakers you just don’t get. Other people adore them and are willing to spend great effort explaining why you should, too. You sit there and listen, you watch another of the director’s movies and you still don’t respond. Which leaves you with two choices: chalk it up to a difference in taste and move
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Ice Age

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on March 26, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

I find the critical and audience reaction to Ice Age depressing. It’s been damned with faint praise or written off as Fox’s attempt to steal a piece of box-office cheese off the plates of the two cartoon titans, DreamWorks and Disney. Yet I loved this movie and can’t wait to see it again; maybe I’ll
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The Time Machine

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on March 19, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The lavish new version of The Time Machine, which stars Guy Pearce as H.G. Wells’ questing traveler, isn’t bad, but it’s not terrific, either. It’s one of those films you wish were longer (it runs about 100 minutes), but only if it were better, smarter, grander. Every five minutes there’s an arresting image.Every 10 minutes
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Miss Wonton; Monsoon Wedding

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on March 12, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Monsoon Wedding Directed by Mira Nair The time may come when the word "immigrant" doesn’t carry the same profound associations it does today. Europe now has one currency; desperate, repressive governments throughout the world (and certain U.S. states) are struggling to stop forbidden information from flowing in and out of their restricted borders; American media
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NY Underground Film Festival

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on March 5, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Two weeks after 9/11, a friend said two things that lodged in my mind and never left. The first was that he couldn’t decide whether the elapsed time felt like six months or one very long day. The other was that he felt a mix of emotions he’d never experienced before–rage, shock, grief and awe–and
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Big Bad Love; Fessenden’s Wendigo

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on February 26, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

A wise actor said that if you seriously want to break typecasting, you’d better create your own role. Arliss Howard, who first arrived on moviegoers’ radar screens playing a gentle-souled Marine in Full Metal Jacket and has played more than his share of gentle-souled fellas ever since, appears to have taken this advice to heart
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Last Orders; Hart’s War

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on February 19, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The World War II buddies in Last Orders are old men, and they spend quite a bit of time in bars, tossing back pints, trying not to talk about the old days and then giving in. They were soldiers once, and young; they helped free the world, then they came back home and remade England.
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Domestic Violence; Birthday Girl

Written by Matt Zoller Seitz on February 12, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

No American documentarian–no major, for that matter– demands as much of his audience as Frederick Wiseman. He asks that we think of life not as a series of self-contained moments driven by individual personalities (the American fantasy of life as it should be) but in terms of systems, institutions, exercises in power (life as it
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