newcritics

He had a voice made for roaring like a hero about to charge into battle against a thousand bloodthirsty tribal warriors so naturally in just about every movie he made screenwriters and directors couldn’t resist the temptation to give him as many roaring moments as they could cram into two hours or three.
His Moses roared.  […]

Some random notes on Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys on the way to a review of the movie Nancy Drew which came out on DVD this week but which is not going to be the feature for Mannion Family Movie Night because the guys think it looks goofy—I’ve seen it.  They’re right.  It […]

Always thought it was a generally accepted rule of screenwriting that if you’ve given your movie a narrator you’ve done something wrong and need to go back and rethink and rewrite your script.
You’re supposed to show not tell and what else does a narrator do but tell?
All rules are made to be broken, especially artistic […]

One of the things that separates professional actors from the most talented amateurs is the quality of their voices.
Put the best community theater actress up against the screechiest starlet, the best local leading man up against the most mumbly son of a Brando, let them deliver the same soliloquies from Shakespeare, and while the amateurs’ […]

First and best thing to be said about The Amateurs is that it stars Jeff Bridges.
Bridges is the one of the very best leading actors working in movies today, if not the best—the moment in Fisher King when his disc jockey character realizes what a real life horror he’s caused by some careless spouting […]

Moliere is the French answer to Shakespeare in Love.
Both movies present their playwright heroes as young romantics and show them picking up stray bits of dialog and observing characters and stumbling into situations that the audience knows will later turn up in their plays.  In Shakespeare in Love, we see the origins of Twelfth […]

I wonder what Heather Graham thinks about her eyes.
I wonder if she thinks about how her best feature is her greatest liability as an actress.
Her directors have. They have to.
Graham’s eyes, the biggest, roundest in Hollywood since Betty Boop’s, aren’t lifeless or inexpressive or unfocused. They are just too…beautiful. They are […]

Mark Bowden’s profile of David Simon, The Angriest Man in Television, in this month’s Atlantic seems to confirm what I’ve suspected about The Wire:  that it’s the product of a brilliant mind made paranoid by the owner of that mind’s certainty that he has figured out the very simple answer to all that’s wrong with […]

Men talk more than women, eh?
Not in this house.
Your experience may vary.
Usual caveats about articles like this. They’re feature stories not science reporting. The writers aren’t interested in the studies and methodologies under discussion, only in the conclusions if they are controversial enough. The point is to stir up trouble, get people…talking, […]

Wolcott is right. He was something like a planet, massive, unavoidable, wandering all over the sky, sometimes more visible than at others, but always exerting his own gravitational field, drawing lesser objects into his orbit, whether they wanted to be there or not, warping the independent orbits of others.
So you’d think I’d have as […]

Tonight I was at Barnes and Noble, having a dad’s night out, and not enjoying myself as much as I would have even five years ago—browsing through the new fiction I kept coming across author biographies that began, “So and so was born in 1980…”
While I’m in the cafe drinking my coffee, a barely […]

You want to see his real, unwrapped face?
Why ever for?
That’s the 11 year old’s homework assignment.  His sixth grade class has been studying Ancient Egypt for the past few weeks and so the news that King Tut’s head is going on exhibit along with the other relics from his tomb that have been traveling around […]

What I was saying the other day?
“Transformers?”
“Awesome.”
I wasn’t kidding.
If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, don’t take my word for it. Chew on this. Back in June, when Optimus Prime and his friends hit the cineplexes, I was terrified I’d draw the short straw and wind […]

I have my own dreams of the open road.  But although I dream them all with a literary finish—-not necesarily with a Fitzgeraldian passage of interior monologue summing up America and my place in it, but definitely with a writing down of my adventures—my dreams are inspired by driving not by reading about other people’s […]

Back in my salad days, a good measure of how much you loved your friends was how long you could stand to be around them when they were stoned.
For me, though, the tougher test came before the first joint was lit, sometimes hours before, at that moment when someone let it be known that there […]

Two weeks and two hours till the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the eleven year old in our house is racing to catch up with Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
He’s been "reading" it the way he read the first five books, by listening to the marvelous Jim Dale recording.  […]

In the opening sequences of Moscow on the Hudson, flashing back to his life in Russia, Robin Williams’ character, circus musician Vladimir Ivanoff, remembers risking being late for work, putting his job and his upcoming, much looked forward to trip to New York City with the circus in jeopardy, to jump into a long line […]

Someday, when virtual reality rules, cgi of Gollum in Lord of the Rings quality comes standard with CorelDraw, and every home has a Holodeck, I will be able to perform the experiment I want to perform every time I see a movie I didn’t like—make a “model” alternative version.
I’m not thinking recuts or mash-ups.  I […]

Family movie night this week was the negligible Happily N’Ever After, a good premise done in by a script that seemed to have been written with the idea in mind that nothing was to go onto the screen that would tax the modest talents of the computer animators.  The result is kind of a […]

In my apparently unread probably because uninspired review of Blood Diamond at my place last week, I described a key scene in the movie as Hemingway-esque.  But thinking it over I think I may have been wrong to bring Hemingway into it.  I was fooled by the scene’s being a conscious visual quote from the […]

"The Red Sox are always winning, until they lose."—Nicky Rogan, Game 6.
For some reason I’ve been watching a lot of movies set in New York City lately.  Heights, which stars Glen Close as a famous Broadway actress engaged in a sexual rivalry with her photographer daughter.  The Photographer, a strange and annoying little independent film […]

…the best movie of the year.
The Oscar almost never goes to the best movie of the year.  The best movie of the year is rarely nominated, and that’s become even more the case over the last decade as more and more of the best picture nominees have been movies released in the late fall and […]

Watch the eyes in the opening sequences of Little Miss Sunshine.
This is gratuitous advice because the camera gives us practically nothing else to watch, beginning with the very first shot looking into the eyes of the seven year old Olive widened in hope and wonder and terrible, terrible, fear.
We meet all the main characters by […]

Question kept going through my head while watching The Queen, particularly during the scenes of the Queen bouncing along in her Land Rover as she drove herself up into the highlands around Balmoral Castle.
Whose job was it to teach the young Princess Elizabeth to drive? Googled up my answer as soon as we got home. […]

Said I wasn’t going to, but I did anyway. Saw The Departed the other night.
It’s good. I liked it. Scorsese should finally get his Oscar, though he’s made better. The movie has no real ending. The catastrophe that brings about the violent climax depends on several characters suddenly getting far more […]

There are four excellent reasons for you to watch Hollywoodland that have nothing to do with whether or not it’s a good movie, which it isn’t.
One. You grew up watching The Adventures of Superman and George Reeves, whose story the movie tries to tell, will in your heart of hearts always be your Superman […]

Was there a time when who wins the Oscar mattered to people outside Hollywood?
The Academy Awards show has always mattered. Watching the movie stars is fun, and not just in an OH MY GOD! Whatever possessed her to make her wear THAT? way, and not just in a Who’s that with Jack this year and […]

Watched Woody Allen’s Scoop the other night.
Me, last week, with emphasis added today:
In the end, I think [Edward] Burns will be content to be judged on the body of his work rather than on the excellence of individual movies and he appears confident that the judgment will tell in his favor. Woody Allen is doing […]

Five minutes into Sidewalks of New York, screenwriter-director Edward Burns has made better use of Dennis Farina and gotten more out of him than Law and Order managed in two seasons.
Eighty minutes in, Burns has made better use and gotten more out of most of his cast than any director who worked with them before […]