Category: (by verdict)

Something weird is happening with Netflix. The CEO announced yesterday the division of their DVD mail service and their streaming service. They will be two separate businesses–the DVD mail service will be renamed “Quikster,” and the streaming service will remain as Netflix. This will take place in a couple of weeks. From the Netflix blog: “So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to ‘Qwikster.’ We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name ‘Netflix’ for streaming.”

Continue reading Nesquik

This is an odd movie. I went assuming it was a smarter, cooler Fast and the Furious, and there are a couple of good driving scenes. But it is primarily an exercise in backward-looking noir, trying to re-create the look of 1970s driving movies, perhaps with a bit of Point Blank thrown in. The driver is Ryan Gosling, who is never given a name, and is practically affectless, with barely a change of expression except for a slight smile when he is around Irene (Carey Mulligan). Continue reading Drive

Another enjoyable, sleek, highly competent, and controlled film from Soderbergh. [Apparently he is giving up directing to devote himself to painting. There was a trailer for his next movie, a good-looking action thriller with female lead, entitled Haywire, before Contagion.] Contagion examines the progress and response to a global pandemic from the outbreak through about nine months out, by which time a vaccine has been found and the virus is more or less under control. Continue reading Contagion

Kelly Reichardt’s compelling anti-Western is almost like Gerry but with a wagon train instead of Damon and the more talented Affleck. I half-kid. She sets up some glorious but static shots of size and distance: clouds moving quickly in silhouette against the stars; the forlorn convoy trudging in miniature on the horizon. But despite the scope–even because of the sweep of the empty Eastern Oregon high plains–the visuals don’t “thrill,” don’t convey a sense of majesty or myth, but rather the opposite. It’s a big, flat, unmarked Empty–with muted colors. Continue reading Meek’s Cutoff

I had this Netflix DVD sitting on my living room table for about 3 or 4 days before I got the courage up to watch it. That’s how Todd Solondz’s films affect me, on the whole. I finally watched it last night, and I was surprised at how “light” it was, compared to Storytelling and Palindromes and of course the magnificent Happiness. Yes, this seemed to be “Solondz lite,” even though the film picks up where Happiness, which I think everyone here would agree is a brutally and relentlessly discomforting film, left off. Having said that, I still enjoyed the film. It’s not without its uncomfortable moments; there are a few conversations between Timmy and his mother (the excellent Allison Janney) that are reminiscent of that final, painful conversation between Billy and his pedophile dad at the end of Happiness. Continue reading Life During Wartime

I was in an airport bookstore browsing for something to read while I waited to get re-routed around the hurricane, and I saw a new edition of Tinker, Tailer, Soldier Spy, It had the tag: “Soon to be a major motion picture.” And sure enough, on the back there was a cast list including Gary Oldman and Colin Firth. Really? Wasn’t the Alec Guinness TV mini-series version about as good as television got in the 1970s? I still have tremendous affection for the mini-series, and I can’t think of George Smiley except as Alec Guinness. And the book has so many moving parts that I doubt it can be compressed into a couple of hours without doing serious damage.

I just watched Season 3 on DVD. I now officially don’t care any more…

Help. I’m looking for a hand full of well-made short films for a class I’m teaching. It’s a three-hour, once a week class which is a new format for me (well, I did it last spring and I don’t think I managed the hours as well as my students might have liked). I need a bag of tricks (any creative exercises you might want to share would also be appreciated).
Continue reading Short Films

CSL‘s title has commas to spare, suggestive of a zaniness the film circles ’round but generally doesn’t care so much about. It’s missing a key modifier central to its impact: sad, painful, lonely.

And that is determinedly NOT a complaint. First, sure, yes: this is a really well-crafted romantic comedy, with much care and attention given to the plot structure (a few moments inflate with the giddy helium of farcical perfection, and only one or two fall deflated to the ground), to the complexity and thoughtfulness of its characters. Carell’s Cal Weaver is a man suddenly, surprisingly dislocated from his life; Julianne Moore’s wife Emily is no less surprised and confounded about her own indiscretion and where it leads the couple. The film’s packed with interesting, knotty characters–who start as the cartoonish Types of a raunchy comedy but, with a smart line, excellent direction, and pitch-perfect performances, attain a gravity that heightens both the comedy and the compassion.

I haven’t a lot to say. It does occasionally enthusiastically embrace convention, and there’s (as with much farce) the occasional strained suturing of plot strands. (There are also, though, some genuine surprises and delights.)

But I wanted to throw out to Brunsy, in particular, a question about its comic force. Where so much comedy derives from roots in rage- and shame-inflected desire, Crazy is resolutely concerned with sadness. The characters collide–and occasionally fight–but even these conflicts are inflected by a compassionate attention to the pain motivating them. What makes the film more than just a reasonably-smart comic romance is this deep wellspring of hurt — and I have been trying to think if there was another comic actor who could do this as well as Carell, or a film so attuned to same, particularly in this era of the never-wanna-grow-up character-driven comedy.