Movie Review: The Little Fugitive (1953)

I might have easily stumbled across this movie while flipping channels late at night, in which case I wouldn’t have lasted through the first five minutes. And that would have been a shame.

At the beginning, Joey, who is about six, watches his older brother and his brother’s friends play games he’s left out of. The level of treacly gee-whizishnes is hard to take, and we’re acutely conscious of being inside a completely constructed world.

The older kids are annoyed that Joey’s brother Kennie can’t join an upcoming trip to Coney Island because he has to look after Joey. In order to get Joey to go away, they convince him that he has accidentally shot Kennie in the chest. Joey flees to Coney Island, where most of the story takes place. Read the rest of this entry »

Movie Review: Iron Man 2

It was often said of the first Iron Man movie that it was “surprisingly good.”

It was good, because the characters were well-drawn, the audience’s intelligence was not insulted, and the dialog was terse and well-constructed. The action was terse too. Stuff exploded, people died, but one had the feeling that those things were happening exactly as much as was necessary. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark was smarmy and obnoxious, but that was okay, because it was a set-up for him to get his world turned upside-down. Trapped in a cave with a failing heart, without access to his money or resources, Stark was forced to re-evaluate his life, and we like him better at the end of the movie than we did at the beginning.

In Iron Man 2, it’s basically like none of that ever happened, except the part where he turns his own artificial heart into a suit of armor that is also a jet plane. Read the rest of this entry »

Movie Review: Exit Through The Gift Shop

Exit Through The Gift Shop is so self-aware, so tightly built out of and around the mechanisms of art and film and pretension, that it’s almost impossible to describe it without making yourself sound like one of the characters within it, and that applies equally to this next sentence, true though it is: This movie is an instant classic, a shoe-in for Best Documentary 2010 Oscar, a documentary about documentaries, a work of art that encapsulates and explains works of non-art, an apologia and a manifesto rolled into one.

I saw it without having any preconception of what it was about, and despite this review, I encourage you to do the same. In film school, screenwriters are taught to make their endings surprising yet inevitable, and Exit Through The Gift Shop has such an ending, all the more disturbing and hilarious because it takes place in real life.
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Movie Review: The Fantasic Mr. Fox

Most anthropomorphic animal stories are really about people. The conventional argument says that children find animals easier to relate to as characters. because they’re simpler than human beings, have clearer motivations, and more intuitively suggest archetypes. This is true of many animal characters created specifically for children, like The Cat In The Hat, and it’s also true of most animal characters created for adults, such as the politically-minded rabbits in Watership Down, or the bourgeois pigs in Animal Farm. None of those animals are meant to be taken seriously as animals. All of their animal characteristics are meant to evoke human characteristics. Any reader who asks seriously why The Cat doesn’t walk on all fours, or how Napoleon the pig is able to speak, is in for a condescending conversation from a well-intentioned friend.

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Jobs I Could Do: 92Y Tribeca Moderator

I had the privilege tonight of seeing director Wes Anderson and actor Jason Schwarzman converse onstage in Manhattan. It was fun being in the same room with them, and watching them interact with each other. I just wish that Anderson would have been asked better questions.

Dave Karger, an editor for Entertainment Weekly, began by asking Anderson and Schwarzman, who have known each other for over twelve years, about their initial impressions of one another. And so, the two men once again trotted out the now legendary story of Schwartzman showing up to the audition for Rushmore in a private school uniform that he made himself. After Anderson made an offhand reference to “Jason’s cousin Sofia,” Karger made a point of stopping the discussion to clarify to the audience that this was Sofia Coppola, and then making a joke about his own name-dropping. Perhaps noticing that both the guests and the audience were nonplussed, Karger mercifully bit his tongue when Schwartzman later said, in passing, “my mother, who is an actress,” referring to Talia Shire. Watching Anderson, a quick thinkinker and a genius of nuance, field a long series of softball questions, was like watching him get his head wrapped slowly in cotton candy. Read the rest of this entry »