'What About Bob,' and other things only Bill Murray can get away with :
Bill Murray might be America's favorite celebrity prima donna.
Bio: Simon Abrams writes about comics, books and movies for The Comics Journal, L magazine, The New York Press and Slant Magazine. You can find a lot of his writing here.
Much has been made of George Clooney’s transformation into a harried care-giver and father of three in The Descendants. But really, if were there were any justice, 2011 would have been more widely recognized as the year of Albert Brooks.
Brooks has reinvented himself a number of times over the course of his storied career, not just as a comedian and actor but as a filmmaker, best-selling novelist and even voice-actor. But when we think of Brooks, we still think of the totally self-absorbed persona he projects in such movies as Modern Romance and Real Life. More
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on January 7th, 2012 10:27pmNorwegian Wood couldn’t have been released at a better time. Thanks to the success of IQ84, celebrated Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase, Kafka on the Shore) has earned some time in the sun, breaking through on the New York Times best-seller list and inclusion on several prominent lists of the best novels of 2011. Too bad Norwegian Wood, a film adaptation of Murakami’s 1987 novel about a doomed love triangle, is only tepid. This is definitely not the movie Murakami fans, new or old, want, though it might be the one they expect. More
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on January 6th, 2012 9:23pmTurkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is an artist who purposely distances his viewers from his characters. This takes some getting used to, but it works.
In the award-winning Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, an epic police procedural, Ceylan (Climates, Three Monkeys) recreates the grinding pace of a night-long search for a body in the Turkish region of Sarilcullu. More
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on January 4th, 2012 1:21pmEvery December, Americans celebrate the holiday season with a number of televised Christmas traditions: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, even WPIX’s yule log. The French celebrate a different way, specifically with Le Père Noël est une ordure, a wildly popular anti-holiday comedy that the Museum of Modern Art has retitled as “Santa Stinks.” More
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on December 30th, 2011 3:27pmThe 10th Victim, a 1965 comedic thriller screening at MoMA this Sunday as part of its “Italian Treasures” series, ostentatiously takes cues from the surreal films of Federico Fellini (one of Victim’s protagonists lives at 149 Lungotevere Fellini). But it’s not really Felliniesque after a point. More
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on December 30th, 2011 2:20pmIn the Sundance hit Pariah, a coming-of-age drama about a teenage lesbian who tries to lose her virginity while seeking her parents’ acceptance, the teenager gets the last word in every confrontation. That's pretty much all you need to know about this movie.
What the audience sees, I think, is the result of writer-director Dee Rees trying hard to a sensitive movie. But she's got an awfully heavy hand. More
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on December 28th, 2011 3:54pmCharlie Chaplin made The Gold Rush, which screens at Film Forum for a week starting this Friday, in 1925. This is just three years before he made The Circus, his influential, last totally silent picture. After The Circus, Chaplin would make sound a significant part of films like City Lights and Modern Times. Later, he focused on making talkies like The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux. More
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on December 22nd, 2011 11:42amDeep End, which screens through Thursday at BAM Cinemathek, is a snapshot portrait of the libidinal awakening of a shy British 15-year-old named Mike (John Moulder-Brown). It’s a coming-of-age movie as imagined by Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski. More
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on December 21st, 2011 3:14pmSuperficially, Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, a new animated movie featuring life-like motion-capture technology, looks like Indiana Jones re-imagined as a boy’s adventure story.
An amalgamation of a couple of comic stories written and illustrated by Tintin’s Belgian creator Hergé, Adventures is a propulsive but studiously faithful action adventure. By and large, the film plays out like a series of ceaselessly inventive chase scenes. Cock-eyed Dutch angles and swooping pans and crane shots are the norm as the characters move ceaselessly from one set piece to the next. More
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on December 21st, 2011 10:46amOnce again, British director Guy Ritchie has defied expectations and, as is often the case with him, he has done so in a way that isn’t good.
His 2009 action-adventure pastiche Sherlock Holmes was perhaps his most even-handed film to date. But consistency is not Mr. Ritchie’s strength. So it’s regrettable but not especially surprising that Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows isn’t nearly as composed as Ritchie’s last film. More
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on December 15th, 2011 11:40am
