There appear to be two different movies occurring at the same time in Gore Verbinski’s “The Weather Man.” One film is about David Spritz (Nicolas Cage), a Chicago weather anchor, whose career is interrupted by his family and his Pulitzer-prize winning father, Robert Spritzel (Michael Caine), by whom his sense of substantive accomplishment is vastly overshadowed. The other film is about a family’s post-divorce struggles, the…
There’s little reason to make a sequel except money, the prospect of which isn’t extraordinarily promising as second efforts go. I keep thinking to myself, “They could have started from scratch, even with the same plot, different characters,” but I’m forgetting two things: 1) How heavily studios bank on star-driven franchises and 2) the scarcity of original ideas. So here we…
Mirabelle, barely able to pay her $40,000 in student loans, meets Jeremy at the laundromat. They don’t hit it off so much as they find no other social engagements interrupting their opportunity for dating and a botched attempt at casual sex. Just when Jeremy is revealed to be not merely eccentric, but (surprise!) an eccentric slob, we meet Ray Porter. Porter buys a pair of satin gloves from Mirabelle, and then, in what is certainly not the last dishonest method he will…
In an opening shot, little Karen Aimes (Elle Peterson), is playing with a Barbie doll as a car pulls up to the house. At first, we see her mother, Josey (Charlize Theron), looking out the window. Then, the shot cuts to Josey cleaning blood off her face. The film gets right to the point: Josey has been beaten by her husband, which, we’ll discover is neither the first nor the last time men will take…
Maybe it’s because I was fixed upon intensely hating Truman Capote, as he is depicted in this film, or perhaps because I had just seen the crisp, ratiocinative Edward R. Murrow as portrayed in “Good Night and Good Luck” the night prior. “Capote” doesn’t strike me as nearly as interesting a film, and Truman Capote doesn’t…
“Stay,” directed by Marc Forster, is a bizarre and almost maddening film—in a good way. The movie begins as a tire blows out on a vehicle. It begins hurtling end over end down the length of the Brooklyn Bridge. Just as you’re trying to sort out what happened, time moves forward to a shot of Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling) sitting on the ground near the burning vehicle as sirens can be heard approaching…
Video games have never been my forte, but that fact did not keep me from spending hour after hour playing Doom 2 on my girlfriend’s computer during my first Junior year of college. I was a terrible, terrible player – but my hand/eye coordination issues were supplemented by my brazenly unabashed use of “cheat codes†that were built into the game for players such as me. This approach worked fine for me because my object in playing…
There is a debate, which continues to this day, over whether journalists should center on reporting or editorializing the news. Edward R. Murrow’s answer was to editorialize, but defend one’s opinion armed with facts, “If what I say is responsible, I am the one who will be responsible for saying it.”