Burnt Toast

shining02.jpgThe turning point in The Shining comes when Jack Torrance encounters a woman in Room 237. Naked, lithe, and beautiful, she gets out of the bathtub and wordlessly approaches Jack. They kiss, but when Jack looks in the mirror, his arms are embracing a decaying old woman, flabby and with patches of her skin missing. It’s not your typical turning point. A heretofore pedestrian movie doesn’t begin to redeem itself, and a previously engaging work doesn’t go off the rails. Instead, things start to get muddled.

Box Office Power Rankings: April 11-13, 2008

Everything new feels old. Al Pacino, at age 67, is the lead in a thriller that was filmed in 2005. It’s called 88 Minutes but runs 108 minutes. That’s old times three, methinks. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the fifth Judd Apatow-produced movie released in the past 11 months. And Keanu Reeves is on top of this week’s Box Office Power Rankings.

Box Office Power Rankings: March 28-April 6, 2008

funnygamesposter.jpgOur Box Office Power Rankings have been grim in recent weeks. George Clooney’s Leatherheads tops this week’s rankings – breaking Horton’s three-week reign – and was the second-best-reviewed movie in the top 10 with mediocre Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 53 and 56, respectively. It’s a bad crop out there, people. So it seems appropriate to get grimmer with Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Funny Games.

Rough-Edged Perfection

spoon.jpgWhen Spoon was finishing its 2001 album Girls Can Tell, the band didn’t know what to do with “Chicago at Night,” which would close the record. In an interview last week, drummer and co-founder Jim Eno told this story about what he and guitarist, singer, and chief songwriter Britt Daniel decided to do: “I never would have tried this, but Britt and I were so young, and we were just like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do it.’ We had to turn all the mixes in for mastering. … We have these two versions, and we like different things about each version … . So Britt says, ‘Why don’t we use the left side of this mix and the right side of this mix?'”