On Movies & Media

I remain flummoxed as to why Beasts of the Southern Wild is garnering so much acclaim. I'd begun to feel a deep distrust of my own first impression, and considered withdrawing my review. But now, Michael Sicinski has published his own objections, and it feels like he saw the same movie I did.

Robert Joustra, the senior editor of Comment magazine and a contributor to this book, emailed me this morning in response to my review of The Dark Knight Rises. Here are his thoughts...

This weekend I read a lot of reviews of The Dark Knight Rises to see how other people were taking it. Two pieces in particular were especially damning, pretty much nailing the coffin shut on Christopher Nolan's Batman... and maybe on Nolan's ouvre as a whole, for this moviegoer.

Some thought-provoking reflections on the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, from the Facebook pages of the honorable Gareth Higgins (mastermind of the Wild Goose Festival), and Scott Derrickson, director of Sinister...

Inevitably, answering the summons of the summertime box office, The Dark Knight Rises. And so does the sun. Thus, we finally get to see Batman duking it out with bad guys in broad daylight. But the daylight reveals other things as well, like the vastness of the city, which gives us that much more trepidation about the prospect of seeing it all go up in a mushroom cloud. Oh, did I mention there’s a new threat in Gotham—a gang of terrorists led by a musclebound brute who wants to nuke the city?

It was bound to happen. Oh, the mixed feelings!

Benh Zeitlin, a first-time director, arrives in exclamation points. He films this as if he has too busy capturing this vision to watch, or think about, how movies have been made before. So why, then, do I find myself writing this with a sense of sadness and detachment?

I suspect this means that we'll see Aronofsky return to lavish scenes of digitally animated spectacle, something we haven't seen him do since The Fountain. But will the movie be a thought-provoking exploration of the Noah story that shows respect to its source material?