Comments on Nick's Flick Picks: The Blog: A Good 'Man' Is Hard to Find

Not just why you didn't like An Education, Nick, b...

2009-10-27T22:48:13.197-05:00

Not just why you didn't like An Education, Nick, but also whether your dislike precludes Carey Mulligan actually being as great as she's been touted.

(And while we're reminiscing about Babs' gifts at line delivery: I know the pre-production buzz was all over Meryl Streep and Cyndi Lauper and Toni Collette, but wouldn't Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd have been a wonderful comeback vehicle for Streisand, had she been up to it? The part demands rapidfire line delivery, deft switching between vamping and tragic heroine-ism, and hardcore belting. You just know she'd have nailed that "Yes, I lied 'cause I LOOOVE YOU" line, which no one except maybe Patti LuPone has ever played for the Effie White-ish effect it demands.)

I am curious to read your comments on An Education...

2009-10-27T13:19:33.216-05:00

I am curious to read your comments on An Education. I wasn't surprised by the grade (I expect anything from you) but I would like to know why you didn't like it.

"Mad Props to Puccini" - ha! It's an especially we...

2009-10-26T01:34:26.819-05:00

"Mad Props to Puccini" - ha! It's an especially weird accent, since that's Eli Roth sitting behind the air-puncher, and it's hard to shed all the lowbrow-horror- and Bear Jew-related intertextuality that's cropped up around him since '96.

Wow! You work for a whole day, and look what happe...

2009-10-25T22:30:27.605-05:00

Wow! You work for a whole day, and look what happens.

@Dr.S: It really isn't paraphrase-able, is it? I saw it in the old single-screen Loews theater under a Swatch store off Harvard Square, and you can imagine the particularly robust mirth of the hometown audience.

@Robert: I never know how I'll do with the Coens, since I can't find any stable meridian between the films I like and the ones I don't. I guess I'm not surprised it's a critical favorite, and I'm halfway inclined to try it again, except that I just felt so miserable while I was there. Can we talk about those women? Or the unrelieved grotesque-ness of the brother, which eventually gets topped off with a sodomy joke? Or the way they recurrently shoot Stuhlbarg from such unflattering angles in these hard, sort of forced perspective, close-range shots that don't do much in the way of characterization but sure make him an uncomfortable presence to be around... Even Carter Burwell offered no real haven in this thing for me. (And sorry about Fight Club, which I assume is your '99 pet, but that second half is just, for me, a frigging mess.)

@Colin: Never fear. It's all through the rabbit hole. Nothing, anywhere, is really like this.

@Catherine: The Mad Props to Puccini really is a staggering accent on the scene. And I sort of hate to poke such fun at this, since it's hard to watch Barbra and not wish she'd act more, given her lavish gifts for reading lines and holding the camera. But this scene and (sadly) most of this movie are just so laborious.

@Tim: Mostly, it seemed stupid and depressed, like the movie couldn't even get itself together to get a real payoff out of the tableaux that work so well as still shots (particularly the tree-roots with all those limp white hands). It just felt shapeless and belabored, without much conviction to match its puerile "provocations." Though I guess if I'd been hoping to see a gene-splice of Solaris and Saw before I died...

@Tim and Guy: I'd be happy to oblige with A Prophet if only Sony Classics would release it before February. CIFF didn't get it, or else I'd have been all over it. Audiard is one of the few directors I think of during almost everybody else's movies, wondering what he'd have done with them. (Okay, not Whip It or Antichrist, but other ones...)

@RC: I am saving Wild Things for sometime soon, but I can't imagine that you made the wrong choice here.

... thank the heavens for your last line, Catherin...

2009-10-25T21:24:11.131-05:00

... thank the heavens for your last line, Catherine. I was readying the noose.

And I'll be crushed right along with Tim. The pres...

2009-10-25T18:16:50.883-05:00

And I'll be crushed right along with Tim. The pressure is on!

And now I'm QUITE happy with my decision to see "W...

2009-10-25T16:49:12.052-05:00

And now I'm QUITE happy with my decision to see "Where the Wild Things Are" that evening instead.

Hear hear re Hoult. The angora sweater alone was g...

2009-10-25T13:41:58.970-05:00

Hear hear re Hoult. The angora sweater alone was grounds for an intervention, or at least a slap.

All this, and a great big D for Antichrist! Can't say I'm hugely taken aback -- I think of it as an A-/D proposition, and there are any number of ways it might drive you nuts -- but I'd love to know whether you thought it was overbearing and arrogant in its gambits, or just plain stupid, or what, exactly. At any rate, the idea of Coffin Rock being a preferable experience at the cinema is one I may need some help processing.

Better news on my sidebar: I've found my film of the year, the one I'd be crushed if you didn't like...

Pshaw Colin, you don't know what college is like. ...

2009-10-25T12:17:39.136-05:00

Pshaw Colin, you don't know what college is like. I don't know about the rest of you, but I know my English lit classes are pretty similar to that clip. We're all stoned, there's no room to sit so we all huddle by the door and whenever our professor/stand-up comedian says anything - and I mean anything - we all appluad and laugh and whoop. Nothing too intellectual, mind, that's a no-no. Amd I'll admit, I never really understood what "courtly love" was until I watched that clip. Thanks, Babs!

...in all seriousness, I laughed my ass off at the guy punching the air when she mentioned Puccini. What?

@Dr S: Wow. After your comment on The Mirror Has T...

2009-10-24T21:24:24.642-05:00

@Dr S: Wow. After your comment on The Mirror Has Two Faces, I hunted down the offending scene on YouTube (it's here, for anyone else with a death wish). I gotta say, I'm in the midst of doing my college apps now, but if I thought any of my college classes would be like that, complete with canned laughter at pseudo-intellectual schtick, I might just curl up and stay that way.

It breaks my heart that you disliked A Serious Man...

2009-10-24T21:16:34.333-05:00

It breaks my heart that you disliked A Serious Man. I don't see how you could call it any of those things (weirdly insubstantial, trivial, etc.).

Then again, you also gave my favorite film of 1999 a C+, so I guess we can't agree on everything.

Oh my goodness, thanks for making me think of that...

2009-10-24T18:44:11.287-05:00

Oh my goodness, thanks for making me think of that first English lit lecture scene in The Mirror Has Two Faces; it's so outlandishly bad that when the movie came on Scottish television while I was staying with two grad school friends of ours, we watched the film until we got to that part, just because I couldn't even describe it to them.

.... by which rights, a good index of my disappoin...

2009-10-24T10:42:09.541-05:00

.... by which rights, a good index of my disappointment in Firth's performance is that he doesn't even try to signal that his character is capable of being bored or embarrassed by these merciless platitudes. And this despite the fact that we already know he finds his students to be a dull, eminently nuke-able bunch. You can be turned on, flattered, infatuated, whatever, you can play along with ham-handed flirtations, and still not want to hear your much-younger seducer talk about pencil sharpeners or about "all the stuff that's always going on in my head, until I'm like, whoa, you know?" Give us something, Colin, that shows that you're massively indulging this, rather than just eating it up. Firth gets the arousal, the grief, and the panic about his own detectability as gay and about his own looming imprudence, but the inanities of Hoult's behavior and self-expression are so colossal that not to address them in Firth's own playing becomes a major demerit of his approach to his own character.

Yep, that's A SINGLE MAN in a nutshell. Hoult's p...

2009-10-24T10:06:44.026-05:00

Yep, that's A SINGLE MAN in a nutshell.

Hoult's performance/character actually made me want to hide under my seat and call animal control. I believe the term "cringe-inducing" was invented just for his philosophic waxings on the metaphorical nature of yellow pencil sharpeners.