December 2009
26 posts
Up in the Air (2009)
JUST SOMEBODY WHO’S LOST
by Chris Cantoni
I really like Jason Reitman’s films. Thank You for Smoking, Juno, and now Up in the Air? I connect to these movies. And not just the movies but the people too! It’s not that I like them all or think they’re super slick. But Reitman’s characters just come with a deep sense of sincerity I don’t often see in movies.
I don’t know another way...
6 tags
Christmas Week: It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?
by Chad Perman
It’s easy to lose track of your life. All of us do it, in one way or another, locked up so tightly in our own heads - our own private little worlds - that we lose sight not only of The Big Picture, but of even our own smaller pictures: our families, our friends, the things we set in motion, the lives we impact and influence on a daily...
Christmas Week: Elf (2003)
IS THERE SUGAR IN SYRUP? THEN YES!
by Amanda McCleod
I’ve noticed that my friends have been asking each other if it feels like Christmas yet. They often shrug in response, as though considering it further would only unearth some deeper concern at not experiencing the usual nostalgia and warmth. I wonder if this is because we are older and Christmas has lost it’s magic over time. Perhaps it...
Christmas Week: White Christmas (1954)
WHITE CHRISTMAS, DECONSTRUCTED
by Elizabeth Wilcox
As most of my friends know, I tend to conceptualize movies in terms of brief, disconnected scenes that for whatever reason stuck in my mind. (So: “The Godfather is the movie where there’s a cat on Brando’s lap, and people are making some kind of red sauce, and Al Pacino is in the rain, and they shoot James Caan at a toll...
Christmas Week: A Christmas Carol (1951)
I WEAR THE CHAIN I FORGED IN LIFE
by Letitia Trent
Unlike most kids between eight and twelve, I dreaded Christmas break more than I dreaded school, and I dreaded school almost every day to the level of sickness. Dread made my stomach churn while on the inevitably long bus rides (we always lived at least ten miles from town); dread made me plan exactly by which door I’d enter the...
Christmas Week: Scrooged (1988)
IN PRAISE OF FRANK CROSS
by Christopher Cantwell
Acid rain. Drug addiction. International terrorism. Freeway killers. Now, more than ever, it is important to remember the true meaning of Christmas.
I have a bone to pick with Scrooged. The movie pretty much came and went in 1988, but because of its seasonal connection reappears every year on cable. This is not a bad thing. The film is...
Christmas Week: National Lampoon's Christmas...
GETTING THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS RIGHT
by Erica U.
All month I’ve been contemplating which holiday movie I wanted to write about and I’m embarrassed to tell you how much time I spent Googling “obscure Christmas film.”
It wasn’t that I wanted to put on airs of sophistication or intellectualism (I watched several seasons of The Hills and went to see Superbad the night it came out; No...
Christmas Week: Gran Torino (2008)
GRANDPA TORINO
by Tess Lynch
If, when Chad proposed that we do this Christmas-themed week, he meant “any movie that reminds you of Christmas, by way of your own tangled synapses,” then I’m right on target with this essay. If, however, he meant that the movies on which we’re writing this week are supposed to be about Christmas, I’m in trouble. Oh well! I guess...
Christmas Week: A Christmas Story (1981)
NO, YOU’LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT!
by Jessie V.
Despite my somewhat androgynous name, I’m a girl, not a boy; I grew up in the 1980’s, not the 1940’s; and I can’t remember ever wanting something for Christmas with the same kind of zeal and eagerness that Ralphie longs for a BB gun in A Christmas Story. Still, it feels as though this movie was lifted directly from...
Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009)
IT IS YOUR OWN FAULT IF YOU ARE WATCHING THIS
by Chris Cantoni
In our post-9/11 world, Americans have long been clamoring for answers, an understanding of where we’ve come in the years hence. Unflinching and fearless, Paul Blart: Mall Cop examines the morality of authority and the public trust in a way few have dared.
None of that is true. Paul Blart, directed by Steve Carr and starring...
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD
by Chad P.
There is a certain kind of film that, if done well, I am bound to fall for each and every time, that plays to some inner note within my heart that never fails to respond accordingly. I’m not sure precisely what it is that resonates so soundly in these films - and it’s not for lack of thinking about it, I can assure you - but then again, perhaps...
Amadeus (1984)
MILOS FORMAN’S MA NON TROPPO VIVACE
by Jessie V.
Although Amadeus isn’t ostensibly a holiday movie, I can’t seem to pass through this time of year without an urge to settle in with a hot chocolate and watch it. I remember first seeing this film with my mother when I was very young at a small theater where they showed it sometime after its initial release. It was exactly one...
When A Man Loves A Woman (1994)
WHEN A MAN LOVES MEG RYAN
by Tess Lynch
Marketing your own personal experiences as art is difficult. When a writer decides to tackle a project the content of which borders on autobiographical, the results can be dazzling, or they can fall flat. The more personal the topic, the more difficult it is to package it without getting in the way of yourself. This is the problem with When A Man Loves...
The Doors (1991)
WHEN THE MUSIC’S OVER
by Andy Sturdevant
Oliver Stone’s 1991 film The Doors is, above all else, a paean to the difficulties of creating real and meaningful art in the contemporary age. It is…
Hey! Don’t you click that “back” button on your browser! Where the hell do you think you’re going, reader? You get right back in here this instance. Look, I know what’s on your mind. “Wrong...
In the Cut (2003)
AMERICA’S SWEETHEART NO MORE
by Letitia Trent
It’s hard to imagine a movie less like a “Meg Ryan Movie” than Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003). The film is a bizarre mishmash of thriller, cerebral meditation on alienation, feminist examination of sex, and slasher movie. Unfortunately, this combination doesn’t make for a particularly coherent whole - but the most interesting thing...
He Said/She Said: When Harry Met Sally (1989)
YOU SAY THINGS LIKE THAT, AND YOU MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO HATE YOU.
by Erica Ulstrom (aka “SHE”)
So I watched 500 Days of Summer on a flight last week and while this is not a review of that movie (which is also a favorite), it made me think of the general plausibility of friendship between the sexes.
Can men and women just be friends? By the time we landed, I’d...
He Said/She Said: When Harry Met Sally (1989)
WHY ARE YOU GETTING SO UPSET? THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU.
by marginal gloss (aka “HE”)
When Harry Met Sally is a film both of its time and beyond it. Each moment seems to exist in a small, perfectly-formed bubble all of its own, a world which we can observe and relate to from a distance as though the characters were lab rats in a maze, a test case by which we might consider the...
French Kiss (1995)
WHEN SOMEBODY TELLS ME THEY’RE HAPPY, MY ASS BEGINS TO TWITCH
by Chris Cantoni
When I first heard about Meg Ryan week, I immediately wanted to do You’ve Got Mail, since I dated a girl who counted it as her favorite for a very long time. Unfortunately, it was already taken before I heard about Meg Ryan week (ahem). Then I knew I had to do When Harry Met Sally…, because it is one of the...
Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
YOU DON’T WANT TO BE IN LOVE, YOU WANT TO BE IN LOVE IN A MOVIE
by Meredith Chamberlain
Dear God, Please send me a widower. Please talk to the women up there, about the men they’ve left behind. Or maybe just eavesdrop. Women like to talk to each other. Especially about good men. More often about bad men, but this is Heaven. Please pick out the right widower, and then send him...
You've Got Mail (1997)
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT EMAIL.
by Meaghan O’Connell
Turn on You’ve Got Mail now, over ten years later, and if you are anything like me, and if so I am sorry because this means you are at a family reunion and your sister has just announced this to be Option B or, “Meaghan’s Life Story,” your uncle has just muttered, “Oh, Nora Ephron. She...
The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (1927)
MURDER WET FROM THE PRESS
by marginal gloss
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog was not the director’s first film but is now regarded as his first serious thriller, the film which marked him out as a director of singular talent and vision. It set up the signature elements for which he would become famous: not only his blondes, his taste for the psychosexual, and his ...
A Serious Man (2009)
AN UNERRING GAZE AT A WORLD OF UNEASE
by Greg Brown
No big name actors. A cryptic trailer. Only a few hundred theaters. Mundane premise. All these are reasons why the latest Coen brothers film has been their quietest release since The Man Who Wasn’t There, but they still seem short-shrift for the pair who picked up three Oscars only two years ago. The truth is that A Serious Man fits...
Cabaret (1972)
LIFE IS A CABARET
by Letitia Trent
When I was a child, before our family caught on to cassette tape players (we were always late to technology), my mother owned a stack of mildewed records, all of which she played over and over again until they skipped and crackled. Her favorite record by far was the soundtrack to Cabaret. The record cover fascinated me—Liza Minelli, in her strange,...