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(04/24/08 4:00am)
A few months ago I took on the (ultimately unfortunate) assignment of reviewing Michael Haneke's own remake of his brilliant 1997 commentary, Funny Games. While the original film was horrifyingly novel, leaving me in a cold sweat by the final freeze-frame of Arno Frisch's deranged smile, the remake found me struggling to remain awake. As my review attested, the remake simply did not challenge me; it did not heighten my appreciation or understanding of the original. In short, it lacked any raison d'ˆtre beyond Haneke's financial enrichment.
(04/17/08 4:00am)
Were Stanley Kramer alive today, he would have loved Tom McCarthy's The Visitor. Indeed, it resembles many of the Big Issue films of the mid-twentieth century.
(04/03/08 4:00am)
Marigold Kitchen sits in a charming converted Queen Anne-style row home at 45th and Larchwood. Inside its welcoming exterior lies claret- colored walls adorned with a minimum of artwork, exposed ductwork, and rustic wood trim. This University City institution, a friendly neighbor for 73 years, continually attempts to reinvent itself.
(02/28/08 5:00am)
Michael Haneke's Funny Games is Pirandello on steroids. Its portrayal of authorial caprice and wantonness all in the name of "entertainment" and "plausibility" is brutal, draining and eminently revealing. The story - a nearly shot-by-shot remake of Haneke's 1997 film of the same title - is simple enough. The Farbers (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart) meet two boyish, amiable visitors (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) at their vacation home. Before long, however, it becomes clear that they are to be the pawns in a horrifying, sadistic series of "funny games" at the pleasure of the young men and, by extension, the audience. Haneke thus reveals just how perverse our voyeuristic obsession with melodrama, violence and raw sexuality in the modern media truly is.
(02/21/08 5:00am)
Garden State is not New Jersey - Zach Braff never even got caught in traffic on the Parkway. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, now studied assiduously at Penn alongside Citizen Kane, seems closer, at least stereotypically. Even so, New Jersey is not just Asian guys speaking like Jewish guys while driving stoned down the Turnpike (though often it does seem like it). So, what cinematic exit must one take in order to experience the "true" New Jersey?
(02/07/08 5:00am)
As Americans, we fancy ourselves as having monopolized postmodernist existential angst. But Theo Angelopoulos's 1988 masterpiece Landscape in the Mist plaintively reminds us that we are not alone in our search for meaning in a bleak universe.
(04/05/07 4:00am)
Remember the kid with the mullet from third grade that always wore that Dungeons and Dragons T-shirt? He usually spent the day planning his Sonic the Hedgehog strategy. Well, he's still around, and he's still just as "different."
(03/15/07 4:00am)
Chris Rock is growing up. In his new film, I Think I Love My Wife, he attempts to incorporate his inimitable shtick into a more traditionally respectable format than, say, Pootie Tang. He winds up with something like Lost in Translation on Viagra.