Spike Jonze has given us more pleasure than most other filmmakers, just in smaller doses. Like this:
And this:
And of course this:
A Spike Jonze short film of Maurice Sendak’s pint-sized classic Where the Wild Things Are might have been solid gold. (An animated short was produced in 1973.) But Jonze has attempted a full-length, live-action version, which makes no sense. Then again, on paper, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002) didn’t make a lot of sense, either, but he and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman conjured movie magic from them. There was hope. (more…)
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It’s very rare for a high-concept comedy to work on a consistent level. Often, the movie is only funny in concept and only contains enough successful jokes to string together an amusing trailer. This is not the case with Ricky Gervais’ (co-creator of The Office) co-directorial debut, The Invention of Lying.
Among the many, many problems with Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, perhaps the most basic is his apparent inability to distinguish between economic and political systems. His conclusion – one he repeated at length on Bill Maher’s show last week – is that we need to “abolish capitalism and replace it with democracy.” It’s a populist idea, to be sure, intended to rouse the (liberal, upper-middle-class) rabble to head directly from the theater to the local Home Depot for torches and pitchforks. But no matter what Moore actually meant – and what he meant is that we need to limit the overwhelming influence that corporations and financial elites currently wield over American life – his message is inevitably lost (at least amongst his decently educated audience) in his nonsensical juxtaposition of capitalism and democracy as mutually exclusive.
