Much ado has been made about Anthony Lane’s recent skin-crawling New Yorker profile of Scarlett Johansson—a weird up-skirt shot of a character study that reads like a grad school application to Esquire. Ostensibly meant as a preview for her role in Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable new film Under the Skin, the 50-something Lane jizzes poetic over […]
Zac Pennington
Posted inCulture
Tantric Depression
Nymphomaniac: Lars von Trier’s long, hard shock
Nymphomaniac is a marathon. Released theatrically in two volumes (with a couple weeks’ recovery time in between, what with all the chaffing), Lars von Trier’s five-hour-long meditation on f***ing, fly-fishing, and the futility of love takes a kind of smug satisfaction in the severity of its indulgences—it revels in explicitness, violence, and anguish to an […]
Posted inCulture
Children of a Lesser Vaughn
Delivery man’s schlocky identity crisis
The quality control folks in the Hollywood schlock factory are a meticulous bunch: They know their craft, they execute it with pragmatism, and for all they lack in ambition, they make up in consistency. Every now and again, though, the schlock factory’s well-oiled mechanisms pump out the occasional defect—a film that, though decked out in […]
Posted inCulture
Terrible Memory Lane
The Butler succeeds in spite of itself
Between 1952 and 1986, Eugene Allen served as part of the White House's service staff, personally attending to the administrations of eight American presidents. Jackie Kennedy gave him one of Jack's ties as a memento after the president was shot. He drank root beer with Jimmy Carter at Camp David. He was a VIP at […]
Posted inCulture
Central Casting
Blue Jasmine: Not the best Woody Allen movie in 20 years
Woody Allen has been making “the best Woody Allen movie in 20 years” for nearly 20 years. In the past decade alone, critics have gone so far as to knight Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and even the totally shitty Midnight In Paris with the dubious title, a critical cliché as lazy as it is meaningless. I suspect […]