Letters from Iwo Jima
[See “Eastwoodian Aftermaths,” The American Spectator, February, 2007 under “Articles”]
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[See “Eastwoodian Aftermaths,” The American Spectator, February, 2007 under “Articles”]
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
A movie that shows how cynicism and sentimentality can be two sides of the same coin
Magnolia, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is like David O. Russell’s Three Kings in being an impressive display of moviemaking talent without ever quite becoming an impressive movie. In both cases, I think, the problem is that the talented writer-directors are overreaching themselves and trying to do too much. In the case of…
John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…
SLC Punk is another teen movie, but one with a serious purpose that is not lost sight of in the first five minutes. Obviously based on the personal experience of the writer-director James Merendino, it presents us with the inherently comic picture of a post-high school punk rocker, called Stevo (Matthew Lillard), and the not…
Amazon, the IMAX film now being shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York, begins with scenes from an old black and white movie of pith-helmeted explorers fighting everything from vicious natives with poison-dart blowguns, to crocodiles to piranha. The picture is a tiny keyhole in the middle of the screen. Then up…
What, I wonder, is the point of remaking a film you’ve already made if you’re just going to make the same mistakes over again? In fact, in Just Visiting Jean-Marie Gaubert makes the same mistakes he made in Les Visiteurs (1993) only more so—perhaps because he took on John Hughes to help him tart the…
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