Despite both a forgettable title and the fifteen years in which Will Ferrell and writer-director Adam McKay have been beating their brand of comedy into the ground since they first teamed up at Saturday Night Live, The Other Guys is an implausibly funny movie. McKay's approach hasn"t much ...
Get Low, a dramedy starring venerable elders Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, and Cissy Spacek, is promisingly based on a prime slab of Old, Weird Americana: the true 1938 story of an elderly hillbilly (played by Duvall) who hired an undertaker (Murray) to throw him a huge funeral before he died. The ...
We won the Cold War two decades ago. Do we yet know why? As T.S. Eliot noted in Gerontion, “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors…” In 1945, Winston Churchill banned all mention of the immense Ultra project that had broken the Nazi Enigma code. Ultra's 1974 ...
In April, I noted that television ratings indicate that sports audiences skew Republican and entertainment audiences Democratic. "Which is more useful to control for propagandizing for your Party: the games or the stories?" I asked portentously. An astute reader pointed to Italy, however, ...
The limited-release comedy The Kids Are All Right has driven critics into paroxysms of praise. For instance, the normally low-key A.O. Scott enthused in the New York Times as follows: "superlative," "outrageously funny," "heartbreaking," "canny," "agile," ...
Believe it or not, it's worth comparing a current box office smash—The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, a Mormon teen vampire romance—to a dud—Knight and Day, an expensive Cameron Diaz-Tom Cruise thriller parody. Knight and Day is expertly made and consistently entertaining, while the ...
Is the grindingly low scoring in the World Cup soccer tournament a bug or"as I"m finally starting to suspect"a feature? Could it be that the World Cup's global popularity is not so much despite all the nil-nil draws as because of the grimness of the scores? The three-match mini-season ...
In 1965, Gordon Moore of Intel noted that silicon chips had been quickly doubling in transistor density, and forecasted that computers would continue to get twice as powerful every 18 months to infinity and beyond! (Or words to roughly that effect"”Moore's Law” soon entered the ...
The astringent new romance film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky might be the arthouse equivalent of that often-proposed high concept blockbuster Superman & Batman. Instead of "Who would win in a fight: Batman or Superman?" Dutch director Jan Kounen delivers: "Who would win in an ...
Micmacs is an extravagantly ambitious blend of Charlie Chaplin's silent City Lights and Modern Times, Jacques Tati's clever but impersonal visual comedies, and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's 11 caper flicks. It is Jean-Pierre Jeunet's first movie since his two hits starring Audrey Tautou: the ...
