Thursday, February 28, 2008

Annie Hall

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Annie Hall (C). I am trying to actually watch some of the DVDs that I have bought over the years and never gotten around to watching. I saw this movie once in college and didn't remember it at all. On this second viewing, 20 years later, I am chagrined that this movie beat Star Wars for the 1977 best-picture Oscar. Although the movie, I suppose, a romantic comedy, it is neither romantic nor funny. Woody Allen (Mighty Aphrodite) plays a neurotic New York comedian named Alvy Singer, and Diane Keaton (Baby Boom) plays the title character, a ditzy gal who's apparently an aspiring singer. Perhaps the problem is that Annie is lovable but Alvy is not. He's pretty much thoroughly unpleasant, and you don't really want Annie to be with him. Tons of brief star appearances add some interest, such as Christopher Walken (Hairspray) as Annie's brother and Jeff Goldblum (Jurassic Park) as a random guy at a lavish Hollywood party. I was surprised in the credits to see Sigourney Weaver (Aliens) listed as "Alvy's date" in one of the last scenes in the movie, so I rewound, and although the people are too small to be recognizable, she is clearly towering over the diminutive Allen. And according to IMDB, Truman Capote has an uncredited cameo as a guy Alvy refers to as a "Truman Capote look-alike." Not particularly great. Or good.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

They're Playing Our Song

Stage review by The Movie Snob

They're Playing Our Song, presented by Irving Lyric Stage. This is a revival of a 1970s musical that was written by Neil Simon and that apparently served as the source material for the recent movie Music and Lyrics (which I did not see). Vernon is a successful but neurotic song composer in NYC with a great apartment overlooking Central Park. Sonia is a vivacious but scatterbrained writer of lyrics. You can imagine what happens when the two get together--it pretty much tracks the oldest template in theater: boy-meets-girl, boy loses girl, boy wants girl back. The performances are first-rate, and the songs are winsome. My only quibble is that the break-up seems a little abrupt. But it's an enjoyable night of theater otherwise.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Book review: C.S. Lewis

Book review from The Movie Snob

C.S. Lewis in a Time of War, by Kevin Phillips (HarperCollins 2002). The subtitle is The World War II Broadcasts That Riveted a Nation and Became the Classic Mere Christianity, and that pretty well sums up what the book is about. It starts off a little slow, describing where the BBC came from and sort of how it works. But it picks up when WWII breaks out, and it is unfailingly interesting when focusing on the famous C.S. Lewis himself. The book chronicles Lewis's agreement to try his hand at broadcasting for the BBC, presumably as his way of trying to contribute something to the nation's war effort against the Nazis, and then summarizes the content of the broadcasts themselves. Eventually, Lewis collected all the broadcasts, modified them a little, and published them as the best-selling book Mere Christianity. The book also includes some interesting tidbits about Lewis's home life during the war, such as the fact that he took in a teenaged girl as an "evacuee" from London during the Blitz. She even contributes some of her unique perspectives on the famous theologian in this volume. Warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in the man behind The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Persepolis

New movie review from The Movie Snob

Persepolis (B+). As I understand it, this movie is based on an autobiographical comic book or graphic novel by a young woman from Iran. It is an animated feature created in a stark, simple style that is both unlike anything I can remember and strangely effective. The protagonist, Marjane, is apparently the only child of a reasonably well-to-do married couple living in Tehran. When she is only about 5, the Shah is toppled from power. Her gentle Marxist uncle predicts a new era of peace and harmony, but of course the new Islamic regime has nothing of the sort in mind. Then the long war between Iraq and Iran rains death and destruction on Tehran. When Marjane is 14, her parents finally decide to send her to Austria for her own safety, but she eventually returns. When the movie focuses on Marjane's romantic woes, it drags, but when it focuses on Iran itself, as seen through Marjane's eyes, it is riveting. If there is any justice, this movie will trample Ratatouille and take the animated-feature Oscar.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Book review: Classics for Pleasure

New from The Movie Snob

Classics for Pleasure, by Michael Dirda (Harcourt 2007). This is a collection of short essays about less-familiar classics of world literature by a lover of literature who wants to bring these works to your attention. Dirda is or was literary critic for the Washington Post Book World, and he has read more literature than seems humanly possible. Here he recommends authors as varied as ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse, French Enlightenment figure Denis Diderot, Russian writer Anton Chekhov, and science-fiction author Philip K. Dick. I cannot judge the wisdom of his selections, save a very few (Dick gets thumbs up!), but I can recommend his clear, enthusiastic prose, and he seldom says so much about a book that you feel like he has spoiled it for you. It would also make a great gift for a book lover.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

DVD review from The Movie Snob

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (B-). How did this random movie find its way into my DVD collection? As I recall, I saw it for sale cheap and thought, "Hey, this was directed by that Time Bandits guy." It has taken well over a year for me to get around to watching it. It is a lot like Time Bandits, except this time the kid who gets to go on a bunch of extraordinary adventures is a girl named Sally (Sarah Polley, 2004's Dawn of the Dead). John Neville, an actor formerly unknown to me, plays the outrageous Baron Munchausen, who bursts onto the scene in an Austrian town under siege by the Turks in the late 1700s. He promises to bring help and sets off in a makeshift balloon. Sally stows away, and they go from adventure to adventure. Sting (Dune) and Robin Williams (Patch Adams) have cameos. It's visually remarkable, and if you liked Time Bandits you'll probably like it.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Sydney White

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Sydney White (C+). After allseeing all these heavy Oscar nominees, I was ready to lighten up with a fluffy little teenybopper flick. This movie, starring Amanda Bynes (Hairspray) as the title character, was it. The premise seemed cute--update Snow White by setting it on a modern day college campus. And so we have down-to-earth, good-hearted, good-natured Sydney trying to get into her (deceased) mother's sorority as a new college freshman. Lo! The sorority is ruled by an evil rhymes-with-witch who kicks her out. She lands in an eyesore of a house on Greek row that happens to be inhabited by (you guessed it) seven dorks. And there are lots of other parallels to the original Disney film. I had a few chuckles, but there's really not a whole lot to this movie. And it earns a PG-13 rating for some gratuitous and jarring bad language that could easily have been stripped out to make this a suitable movie for the 13-and-under crowd.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Michael Clayton

New from The Movie Snob

Michael Clayton (A). Even though (or perhaps because) I’m a lawyer and this is movie about lawyers, I never had much inclination to see this movie. But now it’s back out in theaters after getting nominated for a bunch of Oscars, and a friend of mine gave it a big thumbs up, so I took a chance. It was excellent, although rest assured that, with Comrade George Clooney involved, it is no love letter to capitalism or corporate America. Clooney (TV's The Facts of Life) plays the title character. Michael Clayton is a "fixer," a lawyer at a prestigious New York law firm that is an expert at coming in and helping fix emergency situations. When a big firm client is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the middle of the night, they call Clayton. And when the firm’s top lawyer defending a huge class-action lawsuit against a fertilizer company freaks out in the middle of a deposition, again, they call Clayton to rein him in. Then things really get interesting. Tom Wilkinson (In the Bedroom) is excellent as the lawyer who freaks out, Tilda Swinton (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) is excellent as the company’s top in-house attorney, and, truth be told, His Clooneyness is excellent as the fixer. All three deserve their Oscar nominations. See it.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Book Review: A War Like No Other

A book review from The Movie Snob

A War Like No Other, by Victor David Hanson (Random House 2005). In the year 431 B.C., only 50 years after a coalition of Greek city-states turned back the invading armies of the Persian Empire (see the movie 300 for a take on that war), there erupted a civil war among the Greeks that is still studied today. In fact I myself read the book The Peloponnesian War by the ancient Greek Thucydides in a college politics class. New books about that war (like this one), apparently still come out from time to time, and this is an interesting one that tries to take us close to the war as it would have been perceived by the soldiers themselves and the lower classes, rather than the generals and statesmen that Thucydides focused on. I certainly enjoyed it, and if you like ancient history at all I have to think that you would too.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

There Will Be Blood

New review from The Movie Snob

There Will Be Blood (B). To sum up my reaction to this movie, I would say that I liked it and it’s very impressive in some respects, but in the end I’m not sure what to make of it. Daniel Day-Lewis (Last of the Mohicans) plays Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector in California at the turn of the twentieth century. He is virtually a force of nature, as is established in the opening sequence showing him digging deep in a mineshaft, alone against a desolate desert backdrop. But unlike impersonal nature, Plainview has emotions — and they are almost exclusively misanthropic in character. As his singleminded pursuit of oil and wealth continues across the decades, he becomes increasingly sociopathic. He is inscrutable but consistent. Less consistent is his foil, a preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano, Little Miss Sunshine). I didn’t know what to think of him, and I’m not sure the movie does either. His character didn’t quite work for me. Bottom line: See it for Day-Lewis’s performance and the excellent cinematography, but I don’t think it’s best-picture material.

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