I also love how the third-person omniscient narrator randomly inserts "like." Gives it that special "penned-by-a-hormonal-11-year-old-in-her-diary" quality. Holden Caulfield-style first person wouldn't work for this genre, 'cause then you couldn't objectively describe how hot you are in your fantasy life.

I've been reading movie critics since I was a kid. They are cultural barometers and have tons of insight to offer, even if some of it is shitty or doesn't stand the test of time.

I'm confused. City Island dealt with "the Internet phenomenon" by being about "timeless, non-cyber interfacing"? Is there a reason to compare it with The Social Network at all? I disagree with most critics on Social Network (thought it was OK, kinda heavy-handed, not Citizen Kane), but sheesh, that's overkill.

Nah, he was too restrained in Bangkok Dangerous. It was an ordinary bad performance. This may be of the same ilk.

I love that passage, but I wouldn't read a whole novel written in that high lyrical style. (And they certainly exist.) What I like is how it establishes a mood, a sense of natural chaos infiltrating this boring suburban setting, that continues with the descriptions of the mountains of useless stuff in the couple's…

I'm against total relativism in fiction — a bad book is a bad book — yet the more I read in various centuries, the more I'm convinced that superlative phrases like "pitch-perfect prose" and "best living writer" are completely meaningless. Was Herman Melville the best living writer in 1851? As someone who's currently…

In the 19th century, many novels (like Dickens') were published and read in serial format, which is just like a hardcopy version of what you might now find on a blog. It affected the content in various ways — like episodic TV series, serialized novels tend not to be as tightly structured as a well-plotted…

I've been thinking hard about why some people like movies like this and others (me) don't. It isn't just a class thing. I have two theories so far: 1. I don't have enough downtime in my life to empathize with those who have time to be bored and alienated; and 2. I'm just a fucking philistine unable to appreciate…

I watched Mother because it was on the AV Club's top 15 list. Pretty good, and twistier than I was expecting, but it didn't blow my mind. It was less predictable than the Stieg Larsson films, but maybe that's just because of my unfamiliarity with the cultural context.

I sat through The Tourist and did not enjoy it. The witty script simply wasn't there. Most of the best lines were featured in the trailer. Depp and Jolie appear to have no chemistry because they're using two entirely different performance styles: she's broad and old Hollywood; he's going subtle, too much so for the…

But there's no question mark. Edgy!

I was 14 when Tron came out and eagerly anticipated it to the point of buying the novelization and the soundtrack. (Must have been my crush on Jeff Bridges, whom I considered Harrison Ford Lite.) I soon found both were better than the movie. It was one of the first crappy movies targeted at me that I was old enough to…

SatC1 was bad, but SatC2 hits a new level and is unquestionably the worst film of 2010. The economic context helped but wasn't solely responsible. Part of the problem was the script's attempts to address the recession by openly mocking anyone who might actually pay attention to it. You can't deny there was chutzpah…

Didn't Salt and Wanted do decent box office? She looks increasingly like a cyborg, though.

The Pullman series was more worthy of continuation, but I can certainly see why they didn't. It's hard to believe they even made the one.

Does this have the same plot twists as the film it's based on?
I was uninterested until reading the summary of Anthony Zimmer on Wikipedia. That's some wacky shit, and it made me think The Tourist might be another Face/Off.

Acclaimed kid director Xavier Dolan is in this movie
Who he plays, I don't know. But IMDB says so. Is he part of the ill-fated family?

Zola is pretty dark, but I'm guessing this movie owes something to Georges Bataille and, of course, Sade. Lautreamont, the proto-surrealist, supposedly is also pretty over-the-top crazy and disturbing, but I never managed to get more than a couple pages in.

Watching Sunshine Cleaning again would kill me.

A Lifetime movie wouldn't have left so many threads hanging and so many plot points unresolved. Jarecki must have been trying for his own Zodiac — roughness of reality, questions unanswered, etc. Or maybe he was just sloppy and I'm being charitable.