The Invisible Counterpoint

Her (Spike Jonze) "The film, with its dewy tone and gentle manners, plays like a feature-length kitten video, leaving viewers to coo at the cute humans who live like pets in a world-scale safe house." ( Richard Brody ) This statement is made by someone who clearly lives outside the safe house. I personally think the number of people out there like that, on the outside, are dwindling, and therefore imagine rather more people are relating to the film than he assumes are cooing. Brody lives in New York, and might assume that most people living in giant metropolises are still denizens of environments who go to kitten videos only as respite from the harsh city, but this may be more and more untrue. The reason is that the leverage cities need to be this way--and it does require leverage: the city as maybe not an easy but a possible sure way to cosmopolitan independence, is an acquisition, a height--may exist too shallowly right now so that in truth they're playing out now ...

Toward the End of Time (John Updike, 1997) Margaret Atwood : "Toward the End of Time'' is John Updike's 47th book, and it is deplorably good. If only he would write a flagrant bomb! That would be news. But another excellently written novel by an excellent novelist -- what can be said?  David Foster Wallace :  It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape. --- Margaret Atwood :  Like many late-20th-century writers, Updike is fascinated with bodily goo, and by things that go yuck in the night. The verbal pleasure he takes in describing the exact nature and texture of Ben's searing and dribbly symptoms rivals Cormac McCarthy on exploding skulls or Patricia Cornwell on decaying corpses.  David Foster Wallace:  As were Freud’s, Mr. Updike’s big preoccupations have always been wit...

The King’s Speech is lovely. Some of my colleagues have, disparagingly, called it middlebrow, but I guess that depends on where your particular brow happens to be located. In a world more perfect than the one we live in, my favorite movie of the year, Sofia Coppola’s extraordinary, steel-rod-delicate Somewhere would be on this list. It’s not a movie about a rich, spoiled, “Why should we care about him?” movie star; it’s a story about a human being who’s lost his way. Apparently, that’s just not as interesting as watching Paris fold over on itself. (Stephanie Zacharek, “ Stephanie Zacharek’s Oscar Picks: Middlebrow Schmiddlebrow,” Movieline, 25 Feb. 2011) "King's Speech" makes not only aesthetes but rights-of-man folk nothing but self-indulgent, self-serving parasites. It makes the duty-to-country crowd just plain right, and those who aren't quite prepared to cowtow to what's ordained -- specifically, King George, in planning to marry out of love, and in...

Kutcher and Portman play Adam and Emma, two young people making their way in Los Angeles with varying degrees of success: Emma — an overachiever who admits that she’s not particularly emotional or affectionate — is a doctor; Adam — irrepressibly warm and affable, if a bit goofy — works as an assistant on a weekly teen-musical show, though he really wants to be a writer. Adam and Emma met years earlier, as kids at summer camp — the movie opens with that flashback, in which young Adam (played by Dylan Hayes) fires the first of the movie’s sexually explicit salvos when he asks Emma bluntly, “Can I finger you?” [. . .] Adam agrees, though of course we know that since he’s just a big mushbug, he’ll be the one to cave in first. And sure enough, he shows up at Emma’s apartment while she — along with two of her roommates, played by Greta Gerwig and Mindy Kaling — are all having their periods. Not only has he brought them cupcakes, which they descend upon with hormonally charged voracious...

Before Hollywood discovered it could reap huge profits by adapting comic books, mainstream movies used to attempt subjects that might have something to do with real grown-ups’ lives. That impulse rarely surfaces these days, but it’s the motor that drives The Company Men, John Wells’ downsizing drama set in the Boston area circa 2008, just as the economy was beginning its long, slow-motion crash. The harsh reality is that being able to make a decent living from really working — as opposed to just pushing money from one place to another — is practically a luxury not just in America but, increasingly, everywhere in the world. You won’t get rich actually building or making things, or trying to run a company in a way that honors or respects its workers. The only way to make money in this climate is to squeeze people as hard as you can and then discard them. That’s a view The Company Men both acknowledges as a reality and rails against. [. . .] But in the end, it’s simply about be...

Like its star, Salt is a spare and lean piece of work; it’s everything a modern action movie should be, a picture made with confidence but not arrogance, one that believes so wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come to make perfect alt-universe sense. The story — the script is by Kurt Wimmer — draws numerous outrageous loops, but Noyce neither dwells on them ponderously nor speeds through them in a misguided attempt to energize his audience. And he makes fine use of his star, an actress whose lanky gait is as delicious to watch as her spring-loaded leaps are. Noyce frames the movie around Jolie’s finely tuned sense of movement, and yet it’s her expressiveness that anchors the story emotionally: In an old-fashioned, old-Hollywood way, Noyce and his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, are wholly alive to her face and all its possibilities. [. . .] Noyce has made his share of action thrillers (he’s the director behind the Tom Clancy adaptations Patriot Games and Clear...