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12 articles
The Naughts: The Actress of the '00s
21 hours ago
If time is an avenger, then the Naughts have had it both ways with Nicole Kidman. In the span of a decade, Kidman was transformed from arm candy into an artist -- the rare movie star who made genuinely interesting choices -- eclipsing her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, who filed for divorce in 2000, with an Oscar win and the embrace, finally, of her peers on her own terms.
However, as the '00s limp to a close, Kidman seems to be succumbing to a personal vendetta against time: by manipulating her face into a mask -- a waxworks ideal of "Nicole Kidman" -- rather than continuing to deploy it as a functional instrument, an artist's tool, Kidman is taking perhaps the most surprising risk of her career: she has chosen to age into glacial iconicity. In this, she exemplifies a decade that treated actresses with ambivalence, waving all the flags of »
- Michelle Orange
The Naughts Project
21 hours ago
We never gave this decade a name.
The Oughts? The Naughties? The Zeroes? For all of the momentous things that happened in the past almost ten years -- and 2000, for many reasons, does seem like another faraway era -- nothing managed to stick by way of a label. And so, now, it seems a little strange to find ourselves rounding up a decade we couldn't even decide on a designation for.
In that spirit, instead of offering more best-of-the-'00s lists, we decided we'd look for the identity of the decade in what we know best -- the movies. We give you the Naughts Project, a two-week series of features arguing for the emblematic people, pairings, films and, because, we couldn't resist, television of the 2000s.
When we look back, thirty years from now, we expect these choices to stand in for all that's occurred in this first span of »
- Alison Willmore
Postmodern Warfare
23 hours ago
No filmmaker working today explores the act of watching as rigorously (and, some might say, as pedantically) as Michael Haneke, whose output largely consists of a single film, made over and over again in slightly different ways, about the viewer's relationship to on-screen violence.
The Austrian provocateur's cinematic lectures on how we're all to blame for fostering a bloodthirsty entertainment culture are best summed up by "Funny Games" (and its shot-for-shot Stateside remake), which -- in typical Haneke fashion -- builds tension by teasing brutality while also cannily refusing to show us the actual slash-and-kill money shots. It's a denial that serves as an audience chastisement for wanting to see, and get a kick out of, true horror. When it works, it's its own kind of knife twist; when it doesn't it can make Haneke seem like a tiresome schoolmarm, an artist who casts himself in the role of omnipotent, »
- Nick Schager
The Year of Apolitical Cinema?
3 December 2009 11:57 AM, PST
In 1989, Spike Lee picked up a trashcan and hurled it into the front window of Sal's Pizzeria, stirring chaos in Bed-Stuy and sending movie audiences into a tizzy about race relations in America. That same year, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma were reopening heated debates about Vietnam ("Born on the Fourth of July," "Casualties of War"), while Steven Soderbergh and Peter Greenaway were making us squirm by challenging conventional moral codes ("sex, lies and videotape," "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover"). Jump ahead 20 years: today's watercooler cinema holds nary an ounce of subversive content. On the contrary, the most talked-about upscale American films of the year uphold such conservative myths as the sanctity of family and community.
Much has already been written about the reactionary elements of Lee Daniels' "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," which, despite its confrontational scenes of rape, »
- Anthony Kaufman
The Naughts: The Critics of the '00s
3 December 2009 11:31 AM, PST
Film criticism as we know it tends to fall into a handful of time-worn categories: an expression of one's personality, politics and taste, with traces of social critique and memoir (Pauline Kael, James Agee); or a kind of performance art on the page, using individual films, actors or filmmakers as springboards for sustained riffs on art and life (Manny Farber); or a scholarly attempt to draw connections between films and film movements, rank filmmakers by aesthetic significance and put works in historical context (Andrew Sarris).
All these approaches have merit. But when you zoom out from the here-and-now and think about what cinema is -- about its dazzling totality, and the characteristics that distinguish it from novels or plays or paintings or dance or music, all of which feed, and are fed by, cinema -- you're struck by how much we're not reading about, by how much our critics either »
- Matt Zoller Seitz
The Naughts: The Actor of the '00s
3 December 2009 10:06 AM, PST
Quietly and unexpectedly, Matt Damon has become the premier Hollywood actor of the past decade. He's lent his minutely constructed, surprisingly athletic performances to the films of directors Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant, Paul Greengrass, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, a roster that's not coincidentally produced some of the most vital and successful films of the past ten years.
His remarkable career isn't simply a matter of a good agent. It's all in the manner in which he so carefully adapts his particular skills to the roles.
Damon's commitment is displayed on his body, which he relentlessly crafts to the specifications of each character -- he's almost the anti-movie star in his physical malleability. Take a look at how he changes from "The Bourne Identity" in 2002 to the Farrelly Brothers' "Stuck On You," a year later. In the former, he carved himself down to muscle and bone, a tightly packed »
- R. Emmet Sweeney
Nowhere Men
3 December 2009 9:29 AM, PST
Remember that warm and fuzzy montage at the opening of "Love Actually," where Heathrow Airport is the scene of dozens of reunions, with lovers, parents and children, siblings and old friends running into each other's arms and sharing their affection for each other?
Those are not the friendly skies that Ryan Bingham travels in "Up in the Air". For Bingham, portrayed brilliantly by George Clooney, airports, hotels and rent-a-car counters are his world, and it's a world that allows him to avoid getting too close to anyone. Bingham's business is firing people on behalf of managers who can't face their own soon-to-be-axed employees, and business is booming. So while Bingham technically lives in a spartan apartment in Omaha, his real home is what novelist Walter Kirn called "Airworld" in his novel of the same name, upon which the film is based.
A seasoned pro at corporate travel, Bingham is a »
- Alonso Duralde
The Naughts: The Television Show of the '00s
2 December 2009 10:11 AM, PST
"It's not TV, it's HBO" goes the tagline, and in the '00s, TV was "The Sopranos," a series that not only defined a channel but, more fundamentally, a decade's worth of living-room drama.
When David Chase's series about the titular New Jersey crime family debuted in 1999, it came equipped with a conceit that seemed, dare I say, a tad too cute -- a mob boss balancing his two "families," and buckling under the stress of it all? Yet cute was something the program almost never wound up flirting with, instead carving out a position as both a key member of America's controversial modern gangster-fiction canon alongside "The Godfather," "Scarface" and "Goodfellas," as well as the prime example of the small-screen's potential to be an artistic venue equal to that of the cinema.
Ten years ago, no self-respecting critic would have made such a case, but bada bing, at the close of this decade, »
- Nick Schager
Danny McBride, That Funny Dude From That Movie
2 December 2009 7:49 AM, PST
Actor and sometime screenwriter Danny McBride has risen to the top of Hollywood's comedy food chain, having handily stolen scenes from Ben Stiller ("Tropic Thunder") and Will Ferrell ("Land of the Lost"), and become the headliner of his own series as washed-up baseballer Kenny Powers on HBO's "Eastbound & Down," a series he helped conceive. McBride's success is deserved, though he certainly gets by with a little help from his friends. Long before he was the "thug life"-lovin' drug supplier in director David Gordon Green's "Pineapple Express," he served as a second unit director on Green's 2000 arthouse breakthrough "George Washington." And he wouldn't have had a cameo in Jody Hill's "Observe and Report" if he hadn't co-wrote and starred in Hill's indie cult fave "The Foot Fist Way" as a renegade Taekwondo instructor who beats up kids.
Momentarily ditching his usual partners in crime, McBride can next be »
- Aaron Hillis
The Naughts: The Buddy Pair of the '00s
1 December 2009 1:04 PM, PST
Nobody in the film business has had as good a decade as the folks at Pixar Animation Studios. They released seven films in ten years, all of them box office hits, all of them critical successes. Four of them won Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature (and the past summer's "Up" stands a good chance to make it five).
Because of the studio's incredible run of creativity, Pixar filmmakers are often asked to explain the secret of the company's success. In an interview with Movie City News' David Poland, "Finding Nemo" and "Wall-e" director Andrew Stanton cited a meeting the company's brain trust held shortly after the release of "Toy Story" to assess exactly what went right that time so that they could be sure to repeat that formula in the future. As Stanton explained it, "We felt that it was a weird, perfect symbiotic combination of there [being] one visionary »
- Matt Singer
Coloring Outside the Lines
1 December 2009 7:18 AM, PST
Sometimes, there's no pleasing critics and cinephiles -- they'll dreamily wish someone like Turkish arthouse force Nuri Bilge Ceylan would break his introspective paradigm and make a genre film, and then when he does, kinda, with "Three Monkeys," everyone compliments it tamely with canned praise. "Suspenseful!" was a common pullquote, though "pulpy" was a term I didn't expect to see but did, in the New York Times.
Pulpy? Ceylan's movie is as elliptical and internalized and visually elusive as anything by Hou, but it's as if actually having a story to tell automatically takes you down a notch or two. And the flavor of the tale defines what the film is for most critics, living as we do in a world still oversaturated in the aura of noir.
The trap of having a film about crime and fate labeled "neo-noir" may well be inescapable, even if the story per se »
- Michael Atkinson
Blue Skies and Black Metal
30 November 2009 7:48 AM, PST
This week's slate gathers together so many big name stars in one place you'd think it was Oscar night already.
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A stripped-down neo-noir with a twist, this feature debut for filmmaker Alex Merkin began as a 2005 short (starring Adrian Grenier, which can be found online here). Grenier didn't return, but Mike Vogel takes his place as Julian, a young man who races to a seedy hotel where his best friend's wayward fiancée (Brittany Murphy) and another man have aroused the suspicions of his pal, who's holed up "across the hall" with a bottle of whiskey and a gun.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.
"Armored"
Having garnered a great deal of attention with his grungy murder mystery debut "Kontroll," American-born Hungarian helmer Nimród Antal first made his mark in Hollywood »
- Neil Pedley
12 articles
