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December 28, 2005
Match Point
(out of four)
The trailer for Match Point ends with a shocking twist. As the film's title appears, so do the words "From Director Woody Allen," and the audience gasps because the preview they've just seen looks nothing like a Woody Allen movie. Well, the movie ends with a twist, too – a wry little joke where Woody gets the last laugh after a perfectly earnest thriller about an ambitious young Irish tennis pro (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who integrates himself into London society by latching onto a well-connected friend's kid sister (Emily Mortimer), only to risk it all over an illicit affair with the friend's fiancée (Scarlett Johansson).
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2005
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
(out of four)
By now, you've probably heard about the cowboy movie in which two men's love for one another is so strong that they travel great distances to overcome prejudice and prove their devotion. But Brokeback Mountain isn't the only end-of-year Oscar contender that fits that description, and while Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada may not be about the love that dare not speak its name, it concerns another issue of social inequity all too often swept under the rug.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2005
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
(out of four)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is more than just a mouthful, it's a franchise killer. Disney has spared no expense in bringing the first installment of C.S. Lewis' beloved seven-book series to the screen, but they've given us no reason to want to visit Narnia ever again.
Fantasy franchises have certainly gotten off to rockier starts before. The first Harry Potter movie was slavishly faithful to the novel and not nearly enough fun in the telling, but at least there you had a series that only gets stronger with each successive book. Meanwhile, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is far and away the most entertaining of the Narnia adventures, not to mention the best known. If handled correctly, the movie might have enchanted audiences into returning again and again to this same wondrous land of mythical creatures and religious allegory (the reason, believe you me, that Disney ponied up Lord of the Rings-worthy dough for the adaptation).
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)
Memoirs of a Geisha
(out of four)
Cinema, by definition, isn't equipped to tell a story like Memoirs of a Geisha. Whereas Arthur Golden's bestselling novel depends on wall-to-wall narration for its insider view of the oft-misunderstood world of Japanese geisha, the movie by Chicago director Rob Marshall conforms to the notion of cinema as an observational medium, where voiceover is derided as the crutch of a filmmaker too prosaic to find an elegant visual alternative.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
Protocols of Zion
(out of four)
In Protocols of Zion, filmmaker Marc Levin seems startled to discover animosity toward Jewish Americans in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, but anyone familiar with Levin's other work will realize that such sensitivity to anti-Semitism was nothing new for the director, just as instances of fervent anti-Semitism were nothing new to New York.
Just two weeks before 9/11, Levin's film Brooklyn Babylon played New York, sparking intelligent debate with its story of a star-crossed love affair between a Jewish girl and a young black man in Brooklyn's tensely divided Crown Heights neighborhood.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 08:59 AM | Comments (452)