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.
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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, […]
Sophie won Survivor tonight because the season’s best player, Coach, made the crucial mistake of overvaluing Rick’s likability and undervaluing Sophie’s challenge badassery. There came a point bizarrely early in the game when it was inevitable that Coach would make the finals, but he didn’t clinch the loss until he brought Sophie there with him. […]
There was a lot of talk when Tim Tebow entered the NFL about him not being ready for the big leagues, being more about the intangibles (great faith, strong spirit, good guy, all effort) than about solid athletic ability. Those people have since shut up. The star athlete, A student and 24-year-old memoir author’s gameplay […]
One of my non-obnoxious Film Studies TAs was struggling to explain to us the basics of plot. We were first year film students, dying to do avante-garde and unique things, and the idea of using standard structural elements to construct our opuses felt confining and uncomfortably like selling out. Then, she walks in one day […]
As a regular movie, Rent doesn’t exactly have classic status. With Chris Columbus’ stagey direction and lack of personal voice, Rent isn’t even a particularly good adaptation of the Broadway musical from which it’s based. The actors are all too old for their parts. The film lacks cinematic urgency. And the once-cutting-edge play about a group […]
The newest play from Canada’s beloved playwright Hannah Moscovitch is a stirring and inspiring drama about groundbreaking Polish/Jewish educator Janusz Korczak, set in Warsaw in pre-ghetto 1939 (Act I) and oppressive and war-torn 1942 (Act II). Against Camellia Koo’s innovative set of destructible paper orphanage walls and directed with sublime understanding by Alisa Palmer, Moscovitch’s […]