I’ve seen any number of first-rate movies made out of novels I’ve never read. To Have and Have Not, In a Lonely Place, The Night of the Hunter, Vertigo, True Grit—all are important to me in their varied ways, and I’m sure the books on which they were based are worth reading, too. (Well, maybe … Read more
Clint Eastwood has directed two dozen films since 1971, all of them wholly professional and some quite good. No mere star, however huge he may be at the box office, gets to make that many movies unless he knows exactly what he’s doing behind the camera. Yet I don’t know anybody who thinks of Eastwood … Read more
One of the most surprising, even paradoxical aspects of film is its intimacy. You wouldn’t think a medium that shows us two-dimensional pictures of 50-foot-tall people would be so good at conveying the smallest idiosyncrasies of human personality—but in fact, film acting requires far more nuance than stage acting, precisely because the ability of the … Read more
Wallace Stevens once wrote a poem called “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.” That’s how I like my movies. I don’t like sequels, remakes, homages, paraphrases, or ironic commentaries, least of all when they exude the stale smell of postmodernism, which is to art what theme parks are to county fairs. (Is … Read more
Now that fall is finally here, I think I’ve earned a souvenir of the excruciating season just past. Perhaps Crisis could buy me a shirt with “I Survived the Summer of Stupid Sequels, and All I Got Was This Crummy T-Shirt” stenciled on the chest? I mean, I’m the one who had to go to … Read more
Sometimes—fairly often, in fact—the prospect of seeing yet another Hollywood movie makes me want to renounce the world, or at least make a nice, long retreat. That was how I felt as I contemplated the lineup at my neighborhood gigaplex, wondering which sequel, homage, or remake to write about this month. The Matrix Reloaded? X2: … Read more
We are never so funny to others as when we are least funny to ourselves. This seeming paradox is the piston that drives the engine of comedy. In the greatest of all comedies—the Shakespearean tales of romantic reconciliation and their operatic counterparts, Verdi’s Falstaff and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte—a pompous man’s … Read more
In Iraq, coalition troops were sprinting toward Baghdad, facing sporadic but fierce resistance along the way. Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera, the Arab news channel, was showing video of leering Iraqi soldiers prodding the bodies of dead American soldiers, some of whom had been shot in the back of the head, execution-style. It was, all in all, a … Read more
Anti-Americanism, like the poor, will always be with us. We are hated because we are rich and powerful—and hopeful. Not so the “old Europeans” of Donald Rumsfeld’s pithy formulation (which made so many people angry because it was so obviously true—telling the truth is always the fastest way to stir up trouble). Unlike us, they … Read more
As Americans have been forcibly reminded of late, 50 million Frenchmen can be wrong, and almost always are. Likewise the 92 percent of American film critics who believed, according to the invaluable Web site rottentomatoes.com, that Far From Heaven was a good movie. Not so. Far From Heaven is, in fact, awful in so many … Read more
In Hollywood, ordinary middle-class life is a state to be escaped, not examined. Unlike their novel-writing counterparts, American filmmakers are almost never willing to set a serious drama in a believable-looking small town (Kenneth Lonergan’s masterly You Can Count on Me was a rare exception) or even a medium-sized city anywhere other than on the … Read more
The screens are alive with the sound of sequels: Die Another Day, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Two Towers, Star Trek: Nemesis, Analyze That, Friday After Next, The Santa Clause 2, Rocky VII. (OK, I made that last one up, but you believed me for a moment, didn’t you?) And yes, it’s … Read more
One of the insufficiently appreciated functions of the novel, as Bernard DeVoto once pointed out, is its unrivaled power to teach. How many of us learned what we “know” about Victorian England from Dickens and Trollope? Or about New York politics from The Bonfire of the Vanities? It is, I think, fundamental to the appeal … Read more
Long ago in Hollywood, Technicolor costume epics were money in the bank and chicken on Sunday. Not that Gone With the Wind or The Adventures of Robin Hood are imitable, but that never stopped other directors from trying to imitate them. What’s more, they still do it, albeit in their own maladroit fashion. I doubt … Read more
Summer is the season of stupid movies. (I do solemnly swear that this is the last time you will ever see the words “Vin Diesel” within a mile of my byline.) So you’d think that critics would have reveled in a summertime blockbuster about the heavyweight subject of religious faith. Why, then, did so many … Read more
On paper, John Sayles would seem to be the quintessence of a critics’ darling. He writes, directs, and edits serious-minded independent films shot on skintight budgets. What’s more, these films are politically conscious (to use his own olive-drab phrase), and the politics are both explicitly presented and impeccably liberal-populist, with a pinch of curdled Sixties … Read more
Criticism, it seems, is a risky business. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, several reviewers who panned Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones received death threats via e-mail, along with sundry other communications of somewhat lower voltage. This one caught my eye: “The mere fact that you actually get payed [sic] to write movie reviews … Read more
According to the Los Angeles Times, which ought to know, Hollywood is cleaning up on G- and PG-rated movies. Three of the four top-grossing films of 2001—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Shrek, and Monsters, Inc.—were made for kids, and a number of similar pictures also did unexpectedly well. No doubt this has something to … Read more
In case you’re wondering, I don’t make a habit of watching TV on Oscar night—sanctimonious self-congratulation is not my idea of a fun evening—but it occurred to me that this year’s telecast might be more amusing than usual, seeing as how last year’s movies were so much more awful than usual. How would the Academy … Read more
Frank Capra called his autobiography The Name Above the Title, referring to the fact that he received top billing on the films he directed. But what the posters called “Frank Capra’s Its a Wonderful Life” is now known to all who see it each Christmas as “Jimmy Stewart’s It’s a Wonderful Life.” Granted, Capra was … Read more