Two men exit what appears to be a motel. As they approach the car, one of them is getting prepared to leave. He drives up a few feet, and then stops. This is an interesting shot, both because it’s setting an unusually comical tone for such a serious film, and because the camera, in a medium-wide profile shot, stays locked to the car’s movement…
Somewhere over the Caribbean, a plane goes down in a storm. Our only indication of the nature of the occupants and cargo is a man toting a gun who, along with the pilots, gets bounced about and killed when the plane crashes. Naturally, this will be important later, but right now, we must move on to the fat guy swimming upside down—presumably learning snorkeling from…
“Proof” opens looking in on a house at night. It’s raining outside, and the television is on. The window is cloaked in rain, obscuring the interior a bit. The scene cuts to the interior and reveals Catherine Llewelyn (Gwyneth Paltrow) flipping channels—sometimes the television’s. The scene abruptly changes to a university. Catherine bumps into…
There is a richness of detail in stop animation of which Tim Burton has become, inarguably, a master craftsman. Tim Burton has invited us back to a time before cinema became inundated with computer graphics. I’m not saying that computer graphics can’t be innovative, but now that every studio and nearly every major film employs it in some fashion or another…
The film opens in Germany, at a train station in Alexanderplatz. The scene intercuts between Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) at the train station, and flashbacks to a morgue and then her husband’s coffin. Ominously rumbling piano notes and a cutaway to birds suggest that this isn’t an ordinary…
The film is replete with its share of bodily fluid jokes, flatulence jokes, physical humor and, uh, an act involving fish you don’t want to know about. While McCarthy does well with some of the physical humor (she could be hilarious in stand-up), the slapstick is sporadic and the funnier moments are so sparse. The story itself is…
Space exploration is a dream that spans many centuries and cultures, and continues to persuade today. As Hanks points out, the very unattainability of the goal may be the root cause of our curiosity toward it. According to NASA’s Solar System Exploration web page, Earth’s moon is…
The new show has had the rough edges of the British version sanded down just a bit. It’s no longer quite as difficult to watch in bits. Perhaps this is because Ricky Gervais’ David Brent is devastatingly real while Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott is a bit of a buffoon. The UK Office always lets us believe this is all real and really happening. The American version, despite copying the original’s “reality show†trappings always…