to skip Tell No One, or at the very least ratchet down the hype and lower–no, more than lower: shove to the floor–your expectations. Imagine a more gallic Ron Howard taking a mediocre thriller, pumping it full of old r&b standards, long shots of hero doctor widower mooning about his allegedly-dead wife, scissoring the timeline so that plot revelations seem startling (when, in any kind of cold expository light, they are pretty damn loony). This is a cheesy late-night cable thriller with a personality disorder, mistakenly assuming it’s a vivid use of thriller filler as fodder for more serious explorations of mood, reveries about love, leisurely paced to please the NPR crowd.

I probably hated this more than it deserved, but… to quote Chris Howell, fuck I hate the middlebrow. At the 1:35 mark I gave up, couldn’t even bring myself to trudge through another 35 minutes of suspense just to get the painfully ludicrous exposition I had already mostly pieced together.

The week of college spring break coincided with my kids’ spring break so, with only a little grading to do, and one conference paper to fiddle with, there was plenty of time to rack up those Regal Crown Club points at the multiplex. (more…)

I’m tempted to write down any number of great lines, or even to upload me humming some of the catchy verses — but we haven’t got the technology. Yet.

Go rent Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Outstanding entertainment — funny, and smart, and (damn!) at the end even surprisingly moving. It’s short, and began life as three acts of an online film, but don’t hold that against Joss Whedon’s genius here, against Neil Patrick Harris’ perfection as the eponymous Doctor, against the criminally-undervalued Nathan Fillion yet again showing why we should scratch our heads that the guy isn’t in many more films than insert-action-comedy-lead here.

I need to think more–and have more time to try to compose some kind of response to–Laurent Cantet’s The Class, but it is the best film I’ve seen in some while, even following my great experience the other evening with Happy-Go-Lucky. I could have watched the film for hours; it felt like we’d fallen into a world, and in its short running time the film worked the kind of wondrous challenging representation of the experience of public education undertaken over the course of the whole of season 4 in “The Wire.” (I actually have no idea how long the film was, as I felt both lost in it for some while and surprised/saddened as it came to a too-fast close.)

The first great film I’ve seen this year. And I guess actually better than anything I saw last year, to boot.

Jeff has already written compellingly but concisely about Mike Leigh’s last film, but I was so taken by it–and so surprised in being swept up–that I wanted to jot a few notes. (more…)