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A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004): B
Everything and everyone has gone to seed in A Love Song for Bobby Long, Shainee Gabel’s drama about betrayal, redemption, and the ghosts that continue to haunt a trio of down-on-their-luck Southerners. After learning of her estranged mother’s death, Pursy Will (Scarlett Johansson) returns to Louisiana to take up residence in the house she’s inherited…
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Unforgiven (1992): A
Clint Eastwood’s defining commentary on – and deconstruction of – the gunslinger persona that made him an icon, Unforgiven remains, a decade after it nabbed 1992’s Academy Award for Best Picture, the actor/director’s crowning Western achievement. The solemn tale of retired outlaw William Munny (Eastwood) and his final murderous act against a duo of cowboys…
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My Boss’s Daughter (2003): D-
Few films are as consistently pathetic as My Boss’s Daughter, an Ashton Kutcher-Tara Reid vehicle (that says it all, doesn’t it?) directed by David Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun). Kutcher stars as Tom Stansfield, a goody-two-shoes roped into house-sitting for his boss (Terrance Stamp) by the domineering old man’s blandly sexy daughter (Reid). Insanity of…
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Top Ten 2004, Part I
The first of my end-of-the-year lists has hit the Internet over at Slant magazine. You can read all about my (and my editor Ed Gonzalez’s) choices for best and worst of the year right here (and yes, I also wrote the piece’s intro): Slant magazine’s 2004: Year In Film And in case you missed them,…
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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) With each successive film, director Wes Anderson pushes his idiosyncratic, painstakingly meticulous vision to the breaking point of preciousness, and Anderson’s latest gem, the imaginatively titled The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, comes closest to crossing that boundary between endearingly eccentric and suffocatingly studied. In a tour-de-force performance of…
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Million Dollar Baby (2004): A-
A sentimental tale told unsentimentally, Clint Eastwood’s stunning Million Dollar Baby sounds like every second-rate boxing movie made during the ‘50s and ‘60s – a lower-class fighter with championship dreams is driven to greatness by a grizzled trainer with a heart of gold – but throws in the seemingly hokey twist that the pugilist is…
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Twentynine Palms (2004): B
A twisted, frequently trying examination of sex, violence and the banal desolation of the expansive American West, Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms traverses ground already covered by his superior The Life of Jesus and Humanite. American photographer David (David Wissak) and his Russian, French-speaking girlfriend Katia (Katia Golubeva) take to the Joshua Tree National Park to…
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The Life of Jesus (1997): B+
The Life of Jesus, Bruno Dumont’s 1997 debut, paints a disturbingly bleak portrait of alienation through the story of Freddie (David Douche), an epileptic skinhead who spends his listless days driving his motorcycle around his rural town, dispassionately screwing his grocery store clerk girlfriend Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), and taking out his latent hostility toward life…
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Hannah and her Father
As most of you know, Cath and I recently had our first child – Hannah Rose Schager, born on November 23rd in Norwalk, CT. Yet while our new, absolutely adorable daughter has kept me quite busy over the past few weeks, I’ve still managed to fit in quite a few films. Three new Slant magazine…
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Ocean’s Twelve (2004)
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) If 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven was an agreeably breezy, lightweight trifle, then Steven Soderbergh’s follow-up, Ocean’s Twelve – which reunites the original’s illustrious cast while adding Catherine Zeta-Jones and a few surprise celebrity cameos – is so insubstantial as to barely register as an actual film. Superficial, meandering and beyond…
