Changes come
On Changes Come, Over the Rhine sounds like a band playing their last concert, pouring every last ounce of energy and passion into making these songs as brilliant as they can be. The result is a performance so intense, soulful, soaring, and astonishing that it will make everyone hope this is actually not the end, but the beginning.Read more
Add Another Fellow to My List of Heroes
In the last month I've:
- read up on the life of Dana Gioia,
- perused his poetry,
- shouted "Amen!" over and over again while reading his book Can Poetry Matter?,
- and interviewed him twice.
I've got to say that he's becoming one of my heroes. He's about as qualified an individual as you'll find on the planet to head up the National Endowment for the Arts. He's doing a fine job.Read more
U2 robbed!
I don't like posting rumors... unless it has to do with titles or casting, just because it's so fun to imagine and speculate and argue.
Remember when we were told that the new Star Wars film was going to be called THE CREEPING FEAR?! Man, that was one of the happiest days of my life. I still have a wild, passionate, deep-down hope that this will indeed be the title of the film rather than something as boring as Birth of the Empire.
Anyway... to the point... now U2 fan sites are reporting that another title is "in the running" and another domain name has been secured for the upcoming album.Read more
I, Robot
I'm giving I-Robot a B-.
The story is decent, focused, stronger than I expected. The film is basically a collision of Minority Report, A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), and Enemy of the State. It's not as good as any of those movies, even though its has a more solidly constructed plot than A.I., and a more satisfying conclusion than Minority Report. It doesn't hold a candle to director Alex Proyas's previous foray into science fiction, the brilliant Dark City.Read more
Happiness is...
...being assigned to see and review the movie A Cinderella Story and then having your friend Peter Chattaway tell you he'll gladly go in your place, setting you and your evening free.Read more
Jim Broadbent and Four Young Actors Head to Narnia
The great Jim Broadbent will be playing the Professor in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and four young actors are headed to fame and fortune as Narnia's legendary heroes: Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.Read more
Bracing for Anchorman backlash
"What a glutton for punishment you are," my colleague Mr. Greydanus said to me after I posted my semi-defense of Will Ferrell's Anchorman at CT Movies this week.
And indeed, I'm anticipating that CT readers will be coming after me with torches when they see that I've given two and a half stars to a film as lowbrow and innuendo-heavy as Anchorman.
But I'm no good as a film critic if I'm not honest, and Anchorman had me sore with laughing. Sure, it sometimes lapses into the most sophomoric and crass of humor, but there is much that is better than that. (What happened to that spectacular collision with the file-cabinet drawer that was in the commercial? It's not in the film!)
Frankly, I'm inclined to enjoy a movie that takes easy pot shots at the kind of arrogance and vanity we see in the media, especially in the news.
Another friend, Mr. Chattaway, reminded me of this G.K. Chesterton passage that may not apply directly to Anchorman, but encapsulates the same general idea...
The time has come to protest against certain very grave perils in the cinema and the popular films. I do not mean the peril of immoral films, but the peril of moral ones. I have, indeed, a definite objection to immoral films, but it is becoming more and more difficult to discuss a definite morality with people whose very immorality is indefinite. And, for the rest, merely lowbrow films seem to me much more moral than many of the highbrow ones. Mere slapstick pantomime, farces of comic collapse and social topsy-turvydom, are, if anything, definitely good for the soul. To see a banker or broker or prosperous business man running after his hat, kicked out of his house, hurled from the top of a skyscraper, hung by one leg to an aeroplane, put into a mangle, rolled out flat by a steam-roller, or suffering any such changes of fortune, tends in itself rather to edification; to a sense of the insecurity of earthly things and the folly of that pride which is based on the accident of prosperity. But the films of which I complain are not those in which famous or fashionable persons become funny or undignified, but those in which they become far too dignified and only unintentionally funny. . . .
Overstreet in IMAGE
It was one of the greatest privileges I've had as a writer to be invited to write on "the future of film" for the 15th Anniversary Issue of Image Journal.Read more