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
Greydanus slays King Arthur
The Decent Films critic showed up at the Arts and Faith Conversation ranting about the latest big screen Arthur...Read more
My chats with Annaud and Schwartzberg
...the directors of Two Brothers and America's Heart and Soul, respectively.
I've been scraping away at the hours for time to write reviews and edit this stuff, and I finally decided to post "almost-there" versions of the interviews, since the films may not be in theatres much longer.
Anyway, I enjoyed both conversations, and I hope they shed some light on the films for you.
Coming soon, my interviews with Patrice Leconte (Man on the Train, Intimate Strangers) and the Chairman of the NEA, Dana Gioia.