Category: movies

Granny’s a Bitch
Grandma. A film by Paul Weitz Elle (Lily Tomlin), the title character of Grandma, is almost unbelievably grouchy. Within the first twenty minutes of the movie she has broken up with what seems to be a perfectly nice and quite lovely girlfriend (Judy Greer), made a spectacle of herself in a local coffee shop and purposely ...
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The Burning Building
The End of the Tour A film by James Ponsoldt I’ve always felt two ways about David Foster Wallace. Like Jonathan Lethem—whom I’ve been reading lately—he’s a major writer from a generation younger than mine. A few years ago I met a young writer who was wildly enthusiastic about Wallace, so I read a couple of ...
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Xtreme Oldster
The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared. A film by Felix Hengren The audience at the oldster movies is starting to get out of hand. There wasn’t much of a crowd in the Asheville multiplex where I saw this movie, but I might have been the only one under 70. We ...
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No Shit, Sherlock
Mr. Holmes (2015) A film by Bill Condon It is the dream of every author to create a great iconic character, someone that people recognize just by the name. Cervantes, our first novelist, created two. In a way he was just writing about two aspects of the human mind, or the human personality. He could as ...
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Don’t Worry, No One Will Notice Her
Spy. A film by Paul Feig. There have always been comedians who were funny partly because of the way they looked: Buster Keaton’s hangdog deadpan, for instance, or Stan Laurel’s clueless bewilderment, or Joe E. Brown’s funny rubbery face, whose mouth could open to an astonishing degree. When I was young my father liked to walk ...
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Tea & Pearls & the Flying Squirrel
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. A film by Alfonso Gomez Rejon. Some forty years ago, long before Netflix and movies on demand, I had a friend named Rob who was obsessed with movies in general and Robert DeNiro in particular. One evening we had Rob over with a married couple of our acquaintance, and ...
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And Back In Again
Inside Out a film by Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen Some years ago, my wife and I would emerge from a movie and say, “That was very Buddhist.” We nearly always agreed. It seemed that movies were starting to reflect Buddhist values, or perhaps that, since we had both started studying Buddhism, we picked up ...
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Just Say Nope
Dope (2015) A film by Rick Famuyiwa. The first thing to say about the three protagonists in Rick Famuyiwa’s new film “Dope”—Malcolm (Shameik Moore), Jib (Tony Revolori), and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons)—is that they’re adorable! (I sound like my wife here.) As three geeks at a ghetto high school in Los Angeles, where guys routinely rob you ...
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I Thought I Heard Somebody Snoring
I’ll See You in My Dreams. A movie by Brett Haley. Starring Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott. I’ll See You in My Dreams is yet another oldster movie (they’re taking over the art houses; stock in some Chardonnay), and concerns an older woman who has been widowed for twenty years, has never been interested in remarrying ...
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Was This the One with the High Voice?
Love & Mercy A film by Bill Pohland. “How did he die?” my wife said, as we were waiting for the opening of “Love & Mercy,” the new movie about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “I don’t know. I think he drowned. But I think everyone drowned.” I had previously told her Audrey Hepburn drowned. I was ...
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The Second Best Exotic Marigold Assisted Living Facility
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. A film by John Madden. We seem to have entered the age of Oldster Movies, and if Maggie Smith can just hang on this could go on for quite some time. We’ve had the First Exotic Marigold Hotel, the Second, and according to the trailers there’s an upcoming Maggie Smith ...
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Portrait of the Artist as a Bulldog
Mr. Turner. A film by Mike Leigh. There’s a lot not to like in Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the British artist J.M. W. Turner (Timothy Spall). The man is often gruff and uncommunicative. He is especially so with his housekeeper, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who obviously worships him and would do anything for him, ...
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