Goodbye, 2011. Hello apocalypse. This past year in movies has felt a bit like a holding pattern, a space to get all contemplative and whimsical before the terror of 2012. Despite a few exceptions, it wasn’t a year in which tentpole summer films grabbed a majority of the spotlight (in fact, many of these failed, […]
Martin Scorsese makes the sort of gritty, stylized movies that are objectively effective and subjectively unappealing to me and my butterflies-and-rainbows sensibility. I never quite got what was so impressive about The Departed and I’ve never actually seen Goodfellas, but with Hugo, the legendary auteur of gangster grandeur finally broke through to me, making me […]
I have only repeated two movies since last year, even though it’s been very tempting to pull out some old favorites (I miss you, Elf! See you next year!). Those two repeats were my essential movies. Every year, the Christmas season begins with Love, Actually, and ends when my whole family gets together to watch […]
What if angels were real, and one of them wanted to bang your wife? Also… what if he looked like Cary Grant? For my second to last Christmas movie, I wanted something I knew nothing about. I wanted to be surprised. I wanted… well… Cary Grant. In The Bishop’s Wife, Grant plays Dudley, an angel […]
As I sit down to take in the perennially marathoned A Christmas Story, I realize that I don’t believe I’ve ever actually sat down and watched A Christmas Story before. Normally, it is on the TV in the other room all day Christmas day, and when sullen child/teenager Rachael got bored of hanging out with […]
I’m watching The Holiday and wondering at that film’s most unbelievable achievement: making me fall madly in love with Jack Black. It’s this scene that does it, one of the loveliest ever.
These days, it is simply accepted that Adam Sandler movies are going to be difficult to watch and yet increasingly generic. He’s made a very comfortable living by continually playing to the lowest common denominator, whether it’s through paint-by-numbers romantic or over-the-top absurdist comedies. But there was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when it […]
NOTE: It’s hard being Jewish at Christmas time, but nothing is quite as difficult as dealing with the complete dearth of Hannukah movies. In trying to put the “mukkah” into the 24 days of Christmas, I decided I needed at least two Hannukah offerings. Unfortunately, 8 Crazy Nights is the only one that even exists, […]