Comedy Films
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Her (R)
Her, written and directed by Spike Jonze, contains three scenes of strong sexual content, and at least two other scenes with frank sexual language. All the sex is varyingly virtual. The movie uses sex both to demonstrate closeness between characters, and the gaps between them. Taken as whole, however, it’s not clear that Jonze understands […]
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Blue Jasmine (PG-13)
There’s something rote about Woody Allen films. In his sixth decade of filmmaking, both writing and directing, he has crafted and refined his own genre: neurosis plus jazz, adultery and A-listers; sometimes there’s murder, often there’s humor, but it is always with a deep sense of mortality. “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my […]
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Junebug (R)
In Flannery O’Connor’s seminal lecture Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction she uses the expression “Christ-haunted” to describe the South. Since first reading this, I have been haunted by this idea of Christ-hauntedness. She goes on to say that the Southerner “who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may […]
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A Charlie Brown Christmas (G)
“Show, don’t tell” is the oldest law of storytelling, that thing which frustrated short fiction profs shout, mutter, whisper, beg and plead over and again in student workshops. “Don’t tell me Pat is angry. Show me. Did he lower his voice? Did he take deep breaths and shake his head? What?” And yet, the oldest […]
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Frozen (PG)
In the first minutes of Frozen, the older of two sisters nearly kills the younger, making it the rare Disney Princess Movie initiated by a brush with mortality. The principle concerns of the movie fall out around this life and death incident. We learn: That the older sister has the power to create and control […]
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Last Vegas (PG-13)
In Last Vegas, journeyman director Jon Turteltaub has demonstrated once again his ineffable knack for tapping into the middlebrow sensibility. Here, as in his unadventurous adventure films with Nicolas Cage, his safe combination of A list actors with B list material lulls the audience into the blissfully false impression that the picture they are watching […]