Posts by: Jonathan Kiefer
A Tribute to Spalding Gray by Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh’s new film does not ask: But who was Spalding Gray, really? That’s a nonstarter, if only because the asking act is best left to Gray himself.
Yes: an act, as in a bit of business -- or a performative personal literature, [...]
Continue Reading →You’ll be glad to know that writer-director Todd Solondz is not finished rummaging through the inner lives of depressive perverts. That puts it more cruelly than Solondz would, which is part of his charm.
With Life During Wartime, a quasi-sequel, as he has called it, to his 1998 film Happiness (i.e. “the one about the [...]
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Directed by Tom Ford, from a script by Ford and David Scearce and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood
It's hard not to notice that A Single Man's timing seems a little awkward. For starters, there's that inevitable confusion with the Coen brothers' A Serious Man, and the [...]
Continue Reading →Best? Top? Favorite? I don’t know what to call them. I had enough trouble narrowing it down to as many movies as years. These annual reflective round-ups always confound me (and you, probably), but the tyranny of ten becomes even more outrageous when dealing with a decade’s [...]
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“Nutrinos have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle. They’re heating up the earth’s core.”
“It’s the biggest solar climax in recorded history.”
“Don’t you see the signs?”
“California’s going down!”
“All our scientific advances, our fancy machines! The Mayans saw [...]
Continue Reading →Written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
As an exercise in futility (a Coen-brothers-appreciation primer if ever there was one), let’s imagine what might have happened had A Serious Man been made by gentiles, or, Hashem forbid, by Arabs.
Under those circumstances, it might be called the most anti-Semitic film of the year.
[...]
Continue Reading →The young gentleman might think he has made a capital move by purposely taking his date to see that film about the tubercular Romantic poet whose muse enjoys sewing and butterflies. Quite. But the young gentleman also should be advised to proceed with caution, for the tubercular Romantic poet in question, John Keats, was among [...]
Continue Reading →By Joseph Epstein (Yale University Press, 2008)
One doesn’t read Joseph Epstein’s most recent book, Fred Astaire, to learn new things about Fred Astaire. One reads it to see what the former editor of The American Scholar and author of Snobbery: The American Version, the wittiest essayist alive according to William F. Buckley, might do [...]
Continue Reading →Written and directed by Max Mayer, Fox Searchlight Pictures
Adam is a new movie about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome. The guy’s name is Adam.
Before we continue, I would like to say that except maybe in the case of Aladdin or Hamlet or Gandhi, it’s automatically lame when a movie’s title is just its [...]
Continue Reading →By Werner Herzog; translated from the German by Krishna Winst (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2009)
In the annals of moviemaking catastrophe--from Apocalypse Now to Cleopatra to Heaven’s Gate to Waterworld--perhaps no famously troubled production has been more copiously documented than Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.
Maybe it’s because, in that case, the making-of really is more interesting than the movie [...]
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