It’s quite ironic that Eat Pray Love, the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir, is being pegged as “boring” or “uneventful.” It is in these very qualities—the estimations of our immediate perceptions, or reactions from a persistent quest for superficial gratification—that the film cautions against placing value. Rather, Eat Pray Love champions soul-searching in […]
(Merie Weismiller Wallace/Paramount) This weekend, Paramount Pictures invites you to a Dinner for Schmucks. If I were you, I wouldn’t be so quick to RSVP. Paul Rudd plays Tim, an earnest financial analyst hoping to fill a recently vacated upper-level position. His boss (Bruce Greenwood) is all but ready to give it to him, too, […]
(Andrew Schwartz/Columbia) “Who is Salt?” inquires the promotional push for the latest Angelina Jolie-starring spy thriller from Columbia Pictures. It’s a question we ponder often during the film, and one whose answer is well explored, unexpected, and not so simple, really. The story proper begins like a punch-line: so a guy walks into the Central […]
Inception (Warner Bros.) (Warner Bros./Stephen Vaughan) So here’s the problem with Inception. Molded from remarkable ambition and complexity, the film must spend a considerable amount of time introducing and explaining its significant set of rules and procedures. At the same time, Inception requires us to understand these rules—to grasp this intricate swirl of concepts—in order […]
The A-Team (20th Century Fox) (Michael Muller/20th Century Fox) Whipped, nipped, and tucked into submission, The A-Team is an expensive-looking, high-gloss action bonanza, so calculative as to feel mechanical, and so unobtrusive or unchallenging in any way that it’s almost spooky. Four renegade army types team up for militaristic operations under the US Army’s banner […]
Please Give (Sony Classics) There’s nothing so extraordinary about Please Give, the latest from female-centric filmmaker Nicole Holofcener, and that’s precisely the point. The film is a reflection of real women working through real issues in our real world—really. Holofcener crafts intensely believable characters in an atmosphere imbued with authenticity, and she does so with […]
Sex and the City 2 (New Line/Warner Bros.) I’m sorry. Am I missing something here? Are any of these women supposed to be remotely relatable? Are any of them supposed to be women at all? There’s Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the whiny, self-absorbed, unbearably wistful alleged fashionista (a claim I more than once felt quick […]
The Lovely Bones (Paramount) For a film that tackles such an emotionally weighty topic—namely, the rape and murder of an innocent girl—there is little genuine emotion to be found in The Lovely Bones. Director Peter Jackson, the master craftsman behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy (arguably the greatest filmmaking triumph of the aughts), fills […]
