Best Dress
Definitely a winner
The Fighter – TKO
By now you all know the story. Two brothers, one a crackhead, the other a straight-arrow. Both are fighters, one on the way down, the other on the way up.
Domineering mom, dysfunctional but loving family. Barmaid with a heart of gold.
Co-producer Darron (The Wrestler) Aronofsky knows his gritty rustbelt atmosphere. The collars here in the film’s location of Lowell, Mass, aren’t just blue, they’re fraying blue, just like the language that punctuates the dialogue like so much taser fire.
I went to see The Fighter mainly so I could make a few reasoned calls as to Oscars, and I will just cut to the chase and admit that yes, Christian Bale should absolutely walk away with the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Skeletal, glazed-eyed and letter perfect with New England accent and rhythms, Bale – along with co-star Mark Wahlberg – creates the most physically electrifying opening to a film this side of Do the Right Thing. (more…)
The Boring American
Dutch director Anton Corbijn makes beautiful people and places look, well, beautiful.
Corbijn hasn’t an idea in his head, but he knows how to make ancient cobblestone stairways look blitheringly atmospheric. He knows how to show off buck naked actors, and their assets, to voyeuristic perfection.
He knows how to photograph George Clooney’s best angles. (And yes, there are quite a few of those.)
But he really has no clue as to how to create an absorbing cinematic experience. Pity really.
So much to work with, so little point.
The American is a non-film disguised as (more…)
eat cliché love
Eat Pray love is either better or worse than I expected. Like a wine that cannot be technically faulted, yet fails to engage the senses, this film seems to lack any distinction.
What it does have is a few fleeting glimpses of a potentially great actress struggling to break out of her contemporary, aging babe, Pretty Woman strait (sic) jacket. So frustrating, this one. The film is somehow packed to the hilt with clich̩s Рwise little brown people, ex-pats finding each other and eating, dancing and drinking with gusto, peasant women disapproving of single women Рyet also misses rich opportunities to bombard us with Hallmark moments.
St. Peter’s dome by sunset – a perfect all-purpose establishing shot that tells us we, and Liz Gilbert (the author/protagonist), are in Rome. You can practically smell the garlic and taste the wine. Yet we don’t get many glamor shots of the Eternal City. Instead we submit to silly new friends bonding episodes — so much so that between Roberts’ pleading eyes (more…)
The Kids are All Right
Written with a crystalline ear for everyday miasmas, Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg dive deftly into the depths of contemporary family ties. The Kids are All Right stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a longtime lesbian couple whose teenaged children are busy testing boundaries. As their 18-year-old daughter Joni, played to restless perfection by Mia (Alice in Wonderland) Wasikowska, gets ready to go off to college, the younger son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) goads her into contacting their sperm donor father (Mark Ruffalo). Set in the hip enclaves of bourgeois Southern California, the film offers us the new American family—green, eco-conscious, bristling with political correctitude—on the verge of more revelation than it can handle.
Director Cholodenko and her co-writer achieve the exact angle of post-hippie rhetoric (more…)
Inside the Flame
A book of sensory adventure: The rituals, passions and discoveries of an engaged life.