Worth Seeing
[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 25, 2013]
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The joke that gives As Good As It Gets its title is the best thing in the picture. Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), a successful novelist, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests itself in an insane punctiliousness about rituals, not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, excessive hand-washing and the like. When his routine is disrupted…
A charmless, tedious and unfunny movie that cultivates an image of — of all things — intelligence
Nobody could be in favor of Victorian hypocrisy anymore. So why do we continue to bash it — and congratulate ourselves for being superior?
At its best, Olivier Assayas’s film, Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) is rather difficult for an American audience, unfamiliar with the classic French silent film Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade (1915), to understand, since so much of it depends on playing off that kind of innocence, but the appallingly poor English pronunciation of Jean…
Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze is a hilariously funny movie which also has some interesting things to say about art and artistry and love and sex and would probably even have interesting things to say about celebrity, too, if it were still possible to say anything interesting on…
The mythology of the Vietnam War is as fixed and immutable as that of the Trojan War, at least so far as the Hollywood left are concerned. Will flattering them get Michael Caine an Oscar?
