Mike D'Angelo
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Story Archive
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FilmReprise
Thursday, July 3, 2008 Writers are constantly being told to write what they know—a perfectly sensible dictum that nonetheless presents the screenwriter with a serious dilemma. What any writer mostly knows, of course, is writing. Trouble is, few things are less cinematic than some dude sitting alone at a computer (or a typewriter, if you decide to go period) trying to work out what word comes next. And so we get movies like Reprise, from Norway, that are ostensibly about the literary world but strenuously avoid any shots of the characters practicing their lonely and visually tedious craft. Instead, behavioral tics multiply like useless adjectives in an attempt to fill the void.
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ReviewsEffortless wit and verve
Thursday, June 26, 2008 The first thing you notice is the haze. Animated films—and especially the now-ubiquitous computer-animated variety—tend to be uniformly bright and shiny. Colors pop; surfaces gleam. But with WALL-E, the wizards at Pixar have set themselves a truly remarkable challenge: They want to prove that they can even dazzle us with crud.
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ReviewsMongol
Thursday, June 26, 2008 Before sitting down to watch Mongol, a Russian effort—reportedly the first of three parts—chronicling the life of Genghis Khan, I skimmed through the dude’s Wikipedia entry in order to refamiliarize myself with his world-conquering bio. The movie itself, as it turns out, plays like that summary writ extremely large (and super-bloody).
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FilmThe Promotion
Thursday, June 19, 2008 America’s self-image as the land of opportunity has such a stranglehold on the national psyche that our movies—even the ones made independently and on the cheap—evince an almost pathological aversion to the plight of ordinary people trapped in dead-end lives. Presented with a film called The Promotion, most of us would expect to see a story about a lawyer who’s desperate to make partner, or perhaps the valiant struggle of a longtime cubicle jockey given an unexpected shot at the firm’s corner office. Instead, what we have here calls to mind a sarcastic Dennis Miller one-liner: “If you’ve made it to age 35 and your job still requires you to wear a name tag, you’ve probably made a serious vocational error somewhere along the line.”
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ReviewsHulk resmash!
Thursday, June 12, 2008 Five years ago, audiences worldwide were less than bowled over by Ang Lee’s self-consciously arty take on Marvel’s most wantonly destructive superhero, which often felt less like a summer popcorn flick than like an audiovisual dissertation: The Not-So-Jolly Green Giant: Filial Consternation and the Unchecked Id. Still, the suits weren’t about to abandon a potential franchise that easily.
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ReviewsHomemade Charm
Thursday, June 5, 2008 Imagine the wide-eyed little boy from Witness abruptly transformed into Rushmore’s precocious Max Fischer, and then further imagine that oddball juxtaposition as rendered with a distinctly British sensibility, and then add a dollop of affectionate ’80s nostalgia, and you’ll have a pretty good sense of the goofy fun to be had.
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ReviewsThe Strangers
Thursday, May 29, 2008 At a time when horror movies from around the world desperately strive to say something Relevant about rapacious capitalism or banlieue violence or Abu Ghraib or whatever, Bertino’s impressive debut, The Strangers, evinces an old-school single-mindedness that’s quite refreshing: This movie’s sole purpose and function is to scare the living shit out of you.
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FilmRedbelt
Thursday, May 8, 2008 In a notable essay he wrote for the Village Voice a couple of months back, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet formally renounced his long-held status as a “brain-dead liberal.”
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FilmA sickly sweet confection
Thursday, May 8, 2008 Movie adaptations of ancient TV shows generally appeal to folks who bear some degree of nostalgic affection for the original series...
