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Reviews: September 2009 Archives
Drifting Out of Focus
By Sam Adams on 09/30/2009
Joel and Ethan Coen have an almost chronic aversion to being taken seriously. Their darkest movies are nevertheless laced with black humor, and in interviews, they tend to rebuff the idea that their work is about anything other than what appears on the surface. Even to the actors who have worked with them, their intentions are frequently opaque. One need only glance at "Barton Fink"'s withering portrait of an Odets-ian playwright nattering on about his designs for proletarian theater to see what the Coens think of artists who advertise their themes. The title of "A Serious Man," then, can only... MORE »
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When Moore is Less
By Sam Adams on 09/23/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIn "Capitalism: A Love Story," Michael Moore takes on his biggest target yet, and his most elusive. Buttonholing reluctant CEOs is one thing; pinning down an abstract principle quite another. With "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore's seventh documentary completes a loosely affiliated conspiracy trilogy whose films rely on emotional logic and rhetorical sleight of hand to fuse superficially unrelated incidents into evidence of larger, more alarming social currents. Arriving just as the economy is showing a flicker of life, Moore's movie risks lagging behind the times. Much of the evidence he offers to support his contention that the... MORE »
Failure to Connect
By Sam Adams on 09/16/2009
Filed under: ReviewsAs the stars walked the red carpet for the Toronto premiere of "Jennifer's Body," there were fans screaming "Megan!" and "Adam!" and one, just off to the side, holding up a picture of screenwriter Diablo Cody affixed to a piece of cardboard and illuminated like a medieval manuscript. Even during this conclave of international cineastes, you'd have a hard time finding someone who could pick the average screenwriter out of a crowd, let alone find a picture of him or her to decorate. But with only a single produced script to her credit, Cody has managed to make herself the... MORE »
Destroying the World to Save It
By Sam Adams on 09/09/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIs it too late for "9" to be the action movie of the summer? Shane Acker's dystopian fable shares a subject with the latest entries in the "Terminator" and "Transformers" franchises (not to mention "Battlestar Galactica"), but his direction is a model of clarity and grace, and his animated, inhuman protagonists are more life-like and individuated than those of the average blockbuster. Acker's feature, an expansion of his Oscar-nominated short, is set in a sandblasted future littered with desiccated bodies and shattered buildings. There are no humans -- the last dies just before the film begins -- but life, of... MORE »
A Combustible Mix
By Sam Adams on 09/01/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIt's fitting that Mike Judge's last two movies have been released over Labor Day weekend, since he's one of few American filmmakers actively concerned with the world of work. Workplace dramas have dominated TV for years, effectively replacing shows that revolved around the nuclear family; none of the overachievers on "ER" or "Law & Order" had time for anything more than a fleeting assignation in between saving lives and catching perps. But movies have, by and large, been reluctant to tread the same ground. It falls to indie realists like Ramin Bahrani ("Chop Shop") and Kelly Reichardt ("Wendy and Lucy")... MORE »
