May 19, 2013

saw: the great gatsby

Some weird casting choices aside, Baz Luhrmann's great American telenovela is surprisingly faithful to the Cliff Notes of its source material, coming across like a deeply earnest gazillion-dollar high school musical. It ain't Shakespeare but it ain't Showgirls either. Grade: B-

May 16, 2013

saw: star trek into darkness

Star Trek's cinematic potential has always resided in its capacity for exploration and wonder, but the movies have frequently lacked the production values and manpower to sustain those goals. It's an emerging pity, then, that while the franchise has finally been invested with a generous budget it's also been entrusted to a man with a vocal and oft-repeated disinterest in its core values. Instead of exploration and wonder we have exposition and hormones, and a series of token references to various pre-reboot milestones that are as perfunctory as they are unearned. Grade: B-

May 05, 2013

saw: iron man 3

Shane Black cynically sidesteps that whole Avengers thing with a stripped-down standalone Tony Stark episode that builds to a pretty vigorous climax. Grade: B

April 28, 2013

saw: oblivion

I have to hand it to director Joseph Kosinski: the science fiction forbears he cribs from are impeccable, and his synthesis thereof, while not unfamiliar, is executed with tremendous visual flair and an unblinking storytelling clarity that's increasingly rare for alien-invasion movies. This is sturdy, handsome, gratifying event filmmaking. Grade: B+

April 13, 2013

saw: spring breakers

In terms of drug-inflected depictions of Florida as a mystical trash-hole, Magic Mike spoke to me more than Spring Breakers did, but I will say this for the latter: There's probably very little disconnect between the movie Harmony Korine thought he was making and the movie he actually made. That, too, is a skill. (Uh, so does this mean I have to watch Michael Bay's Pain & Gain in order to complete the Sunshine State trifecta?) Grade: B

April 10, 2013

read: this one is mine

In many respects, Semple's first novel reads like a rough draft of her second and more celebrated one, right down to the cardinal pairing of a drifting, privileged wife and a saintly, successful husband. The author's television-background flair for dialog is evident here, although the narrative is more haphazard and her characterizations not as generous. The casual mingling of real brands and imagined events that energized Bernadette feels forced and guidebookish here. ("Violet arrived at Kate Mantilini before one so she could score a booth. The busboy brought some of their fabulous sourdough bread.") There is also a curious preponderance of Los Angeles street names that recalls Saturday Night Live's Southland satire, "The Californians." Where the novel succeeds, it overdelivers, but where it falters, it's a slog.

March 10, 2013

saw: oz the great and powerful

While Sam Raimi brings marginally more conviction to Disney's latest force-majeure retelling of a fantasy classic than Tim Burton brought to Alice in Wonderland, the net result is still an overstuffed production that frequently strands its actors, dazed and dispirited, in an Oz that's more green-screen than emerald. Grade: C

February 10, 2013

saw: side effects

A bracingly nasty, vintage-Verhoeven–nasty, Basic Instinct–nasty little thriller. Grade: B+

January 09, 2013

listening: lady adelaide

Artist: Benjamin Gibbard. Album: Former Lives.

listening: overdrawn

Artist: White Sea. Album: Girls, Vol. 1 (Music From the HBO® Original Series).

listening: demons

Artist: The Words. Album: Demons (Single) – Single.

January 02, 2013

read: a hologram for the king

The prose is frequently duller than I would expect from Eggers, although it contains some beautiful fragments. The characters are equally listless. The story is a fitful mingling of The Sheltering Sky and Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels, lacking the former's cold clarity and the latter's vitality. The three hundred–odd pages lurch by.

December 29, 2012

saw: life of pi

In its gentle, lyrical first act, Ang Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's magic-realist fable recalls one of Alfonso Cuarón's family movies: generous, full of invention, keenly aware of the impact visual stimulation can have on young minds. Once the Castaway-esque second act kicks in, the visuals continue to boast some of the finest, most carefully composed 3D I've ever seen, but the rigors of survival slowly sap the vitality of the fantasy. Grade: B+

December 28, 2012

listening: freedom

Artist: Anthony Hamilton & Elayna Boynton. Album: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack).

listening: poison lips

Artist: Vitalic. Album: Flashmob.

December 27, 2012

saw: django unchained

When Quentin Tarantino is dead set on entertaining the fuck out of you, it's hard not to be entertained the fuck out of. Grade: B+

December 21, 2012

read: penumbra's 24-hour bookstore

Robin Sloan combines the relaxed technological fellowship of Douglas Coupland's Microserfs with the deceptively low-key topicality of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. There's an ingratiating sliver of Joshua Ferris in there too, near the end.

December 18, 2012

saw: an unexpected journey

Affable, eventful and cynical in that polarizing, You Know, For Kids!™ Stars Wars–prequel way, albeit executed with considerably more affection for the underlying material. I didn't mind it. Grade: B

December 14, 2012

saw: zero dark thirty

Kathryn Bigelow delivers a steely, self-assured technothriller that oozes prestige but never quite achieves the brutal visual poetry of a Black Hawk Down, the sweeping social consciousness of a Syriana or even the buttered-popcorn pleasures of a Clear and Present Danger. Grade: B+

December 10, 2012

listening: for you

Artist: Wolf Rider. Album: For You – Single.

December 05, 2012

listening: stardust

Artist: Lena. Album: Stardust.

saw: les misérables

I'm not familiar with the eponymous musical; however, I am familiar with Tom Hooper's films. I'm inclined to attribute this film's shortcomings to the musical and its strengths to the filmmaker. Grade: B-

December 04, 2012

listening: tunnels

Artist: The Hundred In the Hands. Album: Red Night.

December 02, 2012

read: the age of miracles

If Roland Emmerich's disaster epics are self-parodies, then Karen Thompson Walker's end-of-the-world coming-of-age saga may be read as a full-circle parody of those parodies: an earnest, human-scale downsampling of global catastrophe. In chronicling the ordinary dangers of adolescence amidst supernatural upheaval, the novel shares some DNA with Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (albeit sparing its heroine the latter's sexual violence). Walker's fondness for simile and lyrical cataclysm also recalls Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead. The end result is a decent stab at science fiction wrapped in a pretty good sketch of teenage girlhood.

November 28, 2012

listening: heartbeat

Artist: JJAMZ. Album: Heartbeat – Single.