Category: overrated

slick, entertaining, and also appalling.

I wasn’t. Robert Siegel’s film, a relentlessly-focused study of an obsessive Giants fan, has gotten a lot of love, for its nods to ‘seventies character studies (or at least its writer/director’s and star’s respective desire to emulate those studies) and for its central performance. Patton Oswalt is properly pouty and arrogant and vulnerable. The film follows Paul from Staten Island through some of his pitiful daily rituals (he doesn’t even go in to the games, but sits in the parking lot and watches on tv with his even more pitiful buddy Kevin Corrigan); when Paul and mate spy their hero QB in their neighborhood, they follow him into Manhattan, and into a strip club, and then eventually wheedle up the courage and go see him. And he figures out they’ve been following him, freaks, and beats the crap out of Paul. Cue the next hour’s sluggish commitment to Paul’s commitment.
Continue reading Big Fan

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.

Danny Boyle’s much ballyhooed film is a crowd pleasing tale of star crossed lovers searching for connection on the busy streets of Mumbai. Simplistic and sentimental, the dramatic action, which jumps back and forth in time throughout, cribs generously from a variety of sources: Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the musical Annie, Bollywood, Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (with an odd nod to August Strindberg’s Miss Julie). The story centers on Jamal, a young Muslim boy, and his older brother, Salim, both orphaned after a violent attack by ravaging Hindus (or so I’m left to assume). A third youngster, the lovely and beautiful Latika, joins the brothers and soon the melodramatics kick into high gear. As a young man some fifteen to twenty years down the road, Jamal works his way onto “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” (or “Kaun Banega Crorepati,” which appears to be a cultural phenomenon throughout southeast Asia), and the film is structured around how this young, uneducated “chai wallah” utilizes his “hard knock life” as a tatterdemalion to answer enough questions to potentially win 20 million rupees on national television. Each question triggers a flashback and so forth and so on. I’m doing my best not to give too much away except my mild disappointment in this thick slab of populist entertainment.

One could argue that Slumdog Millionaire chronicles India’s economic ascent during the age of globalization, but the film’s lurid portrait of India is painted in oversaturated hues. The film itself is visually busy—unnecessarily so. Everyone is corrupt, filth and degradation cover all most surfaces, and idealistic young love is a crap shoot at best. One thing that intrigued me is that Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy seem to extol western virtues throughout, celebrating a “pick yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality that privileges individual will over the community. Perhaps such notions are also celebrated in India. I’ll be curious to hear what others have to say.

HTM!!! Imagine Robert Redford’s Ordinary People–hopped up on steroids—colliding into a three-day “One World” music festival (you know: Peter Gabriel, Amadou and Mariam, Beausoleil, Damon Alburn, Jorge Ben, Clube Do Balanço, Manu Chao, Daft Punk, Toots and the Maytals, Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba, and, yes, TV on the Radio). I’ve grown highly suspect of movies about white people living in seven million dollar Connecticut estates; all this east coast, upper-class, boho bonhomie starts to scratch away at my spleen. No matter how many virtuous, upstanding people of color Jonathan Demme pours into the frame, Rachel Getting Married is still an over-the-top American tragedy about white people in carefully appointed rooms. That being said, Anne Hathaway gives a stunning, transcendent, raw and emotional, career-changing performance. It’s the best acting I’ve seen on the big screen since Daniel Day Lewis drilled for oil. If only Jenny Lumet had toned down the dramaturgical dead ends and shrill histrionics and Demme had exiled the great majority of his buddies and family members to the catering tables (I kept expecting Spalding Gray to return from the dead), the film might have settled in on a potentially lacerating evisceration of family dysfunction . . . but no, this is a world where Robyn Hitchcock sings songs in the backyard during a reception best described as a coalition of rainbows . . . I’ll take Margo at the Wedding, thank you.

has anyone seen this?

heart in the right place, i guess — heroes schmeroes, PTSD, the banal brutality of war. but why oh why do american directors have to spell everything out so damn explicitly? and why oh why do they feel a need to give us the same damn soundtrack every single time?

i wish i hadn’t seen it.