Time and again Hollywood, wearing its artist’s beret, attempts to satirize the entertainment business, of which Hollywood itself is so huge a part. Time and time and again it fails. I wonder why that is? By coincidence, we have the two latest attempts opening in consecutive weeks. But where 15 Minutes is a typical failure…
Enemy at the Gates, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, aspires to the Saving Private Ryan level of spectacle, but offers a bit more in the way of dramatic coherence. What a curious way it has, however, of representing for us the vast slaughterhouse of the Battle of Stalingrad—that is, as a solo duel between a Russian…
If, as I believe, the new media aristocracy is essentially the aristocracy of feeling, then Johnny Depp is the crown prince. Was ever a face more perfectly constructed to express our turn-of-the-century ideal of a fine vulnerability, a noble sensitivity to every emotional breeze that ripples its surface? Unfortunately, with looks like his there are…
Maybe I’m growing tired and jaded from seeing large numbers of mediocre movies, but more and more I find that the best I can say of a romantic comedy is that it’s not so bad as I expected it to be. This is certainly true of Someone Like You, primary responsibility for which belongs to…
I’m not quite sure how it does it, but the Australian film, The Dish, directed by Rob Sitch, gives the best cinematic account known to me of the American space program. On the surface, it is only tangentially about the Apollo 11 moonshot in July, 1969. Instead it concentrates on the true story of the…
Bad jokes are like rotten apples: it only takes a few of them to spoil the whole barrel. Company Man, a co-written, co-directed effort by Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, starts off very promisingly. Its jokes are crisp and tart and juicy. But not long into it we take our first bite of the rotten…
Let it not be said that Memento, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, has nothing to say. On the contrary, it has a very serious point to make about the way that people manufacture their own reality. In particular, as its subject is revenge and memory-loss, it encourages us to wonder if all revenge is…
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…
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…
I should say that I have not seen the original film of 1968 which inspired the remake of Sweet November, written by Kurt Voelker and directed by Pat O’Connor. But I have seen so many films so much like it — admittedly not many of them recently — that the remake looks very familiar indeed….
3000 Miles To Graceland, a heist movie whose connection to Elvis is extremely tenuous, does persuade us of one thing: that Kevin Costner is much better as a villain than he is as the sensitive, silent, wounded hero he has been playing for most of his career. The trouble is that the villain is as…
It’s got Brad. And Julia. It’s also got a Very Big Star in a surprise cameo in the last reel playing (uncredited) the mysterious tycoon whom everybody has been talking about but no one has seen. And, as if all that were not enough for you, it’s got Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in the very…
