Culture Snob Near the end of Nathaniel Kahn’s engaging and illuminating documentary My Architect: A Son’s Journey, one of his interview subjects suggests that some people with greatness in them must be excused for being boorish, emotionally absent, or simply insufferable as human beings. They should be forgiven because they have a higher calling: God’s work.
I shan’t belabor the point – apples and oranges and all that stuff – but how in the hell do The Jacket and The Grudge score roughly the same with critics?
In toto, Errol Morris’ First Person doesn’t feel scattershot; it comes together at the end in mysterious, alchemic, and near-miraculous ways. The television series is a composition of disparate moods, tones, and colors, touching on myriad extremities of the human condition and containing multitudes, but it also has an elusive quality of oneness.
Neither Red Eye nor The Skeleton Key would survive my typical level of indoor scrutiny, but neither sucked, which made the pairing perfect for a Saturday night outdoors with pizza and beer.
I rarely complain that a movie is too short, but Paul Haggis’ Crash is too short. I don’t mean that I didn’t want it to end – quite the contrary. Instead, I mean that at 113 minutes it’s overcrowded, rushed, and skeletal, all to the degree that it’s only intermittently credible.
Forget about the shit, piss, vomit, semen, vaginal mucus, blood, burst boils, incest, abortions, anal sex, oral sex, fisting, bestiality, sex with wounds, anal musical talent, and other pleasantries in The Aristocrats. I wanna talk about editing!
The Constant Gardener is about a guy who finally finds a spine. And he’s part of a film that never does.
Errol Morris’ Vernon, Florida has no apparent reason for existing, no message, no discernible structure, and only the faintest of pulses. It’s lazy, mean-spirited, hateful, and tedious. Why, then, is it so valuable?
Is it any wonder the dead are fed up and primed for revolt? Is it any surprise that writer/director George A. Romero is cheering them on in Land of the Dead? And is it so hard to see these zombies as a blunt allegory for racial minorities, the impoverished, the politically disenfranchised? On the final question, apparently so.
Neko Case is a siren whose seductive voice might be the single most alluring instrument in music today – clear, robust, sexy, self-possessed, and expressive, with an endearing hint of nasally imperfection. On her solo albums, that voice is the centerpiece of beautifully arranged country-tinged songs, without a hint of irony. They’re dark, atmospheric, and – at their most world-weary – nearly spectral in their power to haunt. And the 34-year-old singer/songwriter can belt without any sign of strain, or lay on the syrup of an old-time country crooner.
