On paper, Shattered Glass sounds like an earnest bore. It’s the now-familiar story of Stephen Glass, a writer for The New Republic who in the late 1990s made a bunch of shit up in his articles. Oh, the stuff of great cinema! Yet the film is amazingly peppy, smart, and light. It might be the most fun you’ll ever have watching a movie that’s good for you.
I’m not a big fan of the online magazine Salon – it’s so knee-jerk liberal that it’s offensive to thoughtful people, preachy to the choir of loyal leftists, and easily dismissed by conservatives. But today’s edition includes three interesting pieces.
Normally, lists of the best or worst of anything offend my sensibilities, but Blender magazine’s fifty worst songs ever seems to nail it, topped by Starship’s “We Built This City.” I hated it way back in 1985, when I liked a lot of awful stuff.
Because I believe dead horses should be beaten, Snob heroine Dahlia Lithwick writes an amusing but bitter piece on the topic of the U.S. Supreme Court and the death penalty.
21 Grams is a beautifully made formal exercise – a story chopped up into so many bits that the audience spends almost all of its energy putting the pieces together. But the structure is so overpowering that it’s difficult to evaluate the content; one viewing suggests the narrative is too under-developed to survive scrutiny or a linear telling.
What, exactly, is one supposed to get from Errol Morris’ latest movie, The Fog of War, winner of this year’s Oscar for best documentary? This feature-length interview with Robert McNamara – secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations – is more mirror than painting, allowing many critics to read into it exactly what they bring in. It’s a curious effect, but not entirely surprising.
My dictionary says a requiem is a musical composition or somber chant in honor of the dead, but Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is more like a howl of pain that builds slowly over 100 minutes to an intensity that’s nearly impossible to bear.
