Wednesday, November 30, 2011
No easy resolutions, but one spectacular performance
By Edward Copeland
It's always difficult to comprehend the sick and twisted minds that would sexually abuse, molest or rape children, whether a disgusting Penn State or Catholic Church scandal is in the news or not. In the movie Trust, which came out earlier this year, it attempts to tackle the particularly sleazy world of Internet predators, but does so in a way that challenges a black-and-white approach to the subject — an attempt that sometimes comes perilously close to crossing lines — not so much into inappropriateness but retreats to formula. Fortunately, it avoids most of those traps, thanks mainly to the magnificent work of the teen actress Liana Liberato whose character the movie revolves around.
Trust marks the second feature film directed by actor David Schwimmer (though I haven't seen his first effort, the Simon Pegg comedy Run, Fatboy, Run) and Schwimmer performs adequately at preventing the screenplay by Andy Bellin and Robert Festinger from veering too far into melodrama and ratcheting up plot points from countless other movies by keeping most of the film's focus on its provocative and complicated nature.
The film stars two of my most welcome screen presences in recent years, Clive Owen and Catherine Keener, as Will and Lynn Cameron, suburban Chicago parents of three — two daughters, 14-year-old Annie (Liberato) and little sister Katie (Aislinn DeButch), and oldest brother Peter (Spencer Curnutt), who has left for his first year at college.
There's hardly a dysfunction to be found in the family as British transplant Will earns kudos for his work in the advertising and marketing field and Lynn serves dutifully as a loving earth mother to the clan. Their lives seem to be ideal except for the part of Annie's life that her parents don't know about, a life taking place in another world that exists within the walls of the Camerons' own home.
Annie has a boyfriend, albeit a virtual one at first, named Charlie that she has met online and grown very attached to through their computer chats. Those chats eventually lead to actual phone conversations. It bothers Annie slightly that Charlie's story keeps changing. When they first talk online, he's 16, though he ups it to 20 soon after. Later, he admits he's actually 25. Annie quizzes him about the lies, but every fabrication that Charlie explains, the teen she chooses to buy the reason he gives for having lied. Why? It's not that Annie is a particularly dumb 14-year-old girl, but she's vulnerable, enjoying the attention she gets from the virtual Charlie that the real boys at school don't give her.
Inevitably, Charlie talks her into a face-to-face meeting, claiming that it might be their only chance since he's told her that he lives on the West Coast and might not be in Chicago again soon. Of course, 25 was a lie as well and Annie feels betrayed, but Charlie (Chris Henry Coffey) charms her enough despite being at least in his mid-30s (if not older) to get her to stay and before Annie knows it, Charlie has taken her to a motel and what he views as seduction, anyone else would call forcible rape. The surprise comes that since Annie denies so much of the truth about Charlie, she claims it was consensual as well even though she fought him as it happened. Her personality changes and she all but brags about experience, which is part of what makes Trust more challenging than you'd expect.
Despite Annie's outward attitude, her best friend Brittany (Zoe Levin) realizes that something bad occurred and she tells school officials, who report it to the police. The film really takes its unusual turn at this point. Her parents, understandably, can't believe this happened without their knowledge. The FBI, in the form of Agent Doug Tate (Jason Clarke), gets in on the case since the assumption is that Charlie, whomever he might be, probably crossed state lines. It's Annie's reaction that proves to be shocking. She feels utterly betrayed — not by Charlie but by Brittany for reporting the incident and getting Charlie in trouble because she's "in love" with him. Then her anger turns on her parents who become overprotective (a bit too late), so she resents them for preventing her from being able to contact him and when she agrees to try with the FBI setting up a trap to try to locate, the cover gets blown and he never calls again. The interference of her ex-friend, her parents and the police have cost her the only person she feels found her special and beautiful.
Liberato, who was 14 when she made the film, gives a phenomenal performance that overpowers everyone else in the film, no minor achievement when the cast not only includes Clive Owen and Catherine Keener but also Viola Davis in the small role as a psychiatrist that Annie is forced to see. The film in no way argues that Charlie and Annie should be allowed to pursue their "love" and eventually Annie gets wise and her breakdown when realizing it is both heartbreaking and harrowing to watch. Liberato truly amazes, giving one of the best performances by an actress that age that I've seen in quite some time.
On the downside of Trust, while it makes Annie so complex and interesting, the screenplay doesn't flesh out her parents or any other characters in the same way, especially poor Keener whose gets a terribly underwritten role. Owen comes off better, especially when he gets some quiet moments toward the end of the film. Unfortunately before he gets there, he's stuck with not one but two clichéd reactions: First, he almost turns into a potential vigilante in the mold of a an infinite number of parents (or siblings or friends, etc.) in an infinite number of films (abetted by yet another portrayal of an inept FBI agent who lets Will steal his computer and files on potential pedophile suspects) that threatens to turn Owen into Liam Neeson in that godawful movie Taken. Second, he gets the ideal career so that he can reassess how he makes his living when he sees how his firm's latest ad campaign peddles young teen girls as sex objects. (The script even gives him a lecherous jerk of a co-worker played by Noah Emmerich to represent the evils of the ad industry.)
Those reservations aside, Trust contains enough thought-provoking material and its avoidance of easy and pat resolutions make up for the parts that border on silly and melodramatic. The credit for smoothing those bumps fall almost entirely on Liberato's young shoulders. I look forward to seeing where this young actress's career goes in the future.
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Labels: 10s, Clive Owen, Keener, Liam Neeson, Viola Davis
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Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Life among the walking wounded
By Edward Copeland
Nicole Holofcener's latest film Please Give will receive this year's Robert Altman Award for Ensemble Performance at the Independent Spirit Awards and kudos to them for picking it out, because Holofcener assembled a great cast for her comedy-drama that plays like a small-scale version of something Altman might have made.
Leading Holofcener's ensemble is her cinematic alter ego Catherine Keener, who starred in the director's previous efforts Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, but Keener is hardly the only show here surrounded by one of the strongest casts I've seen in an independent film in quite some time.
Keener plays Kate, a New Yorker who takes being charitable to the extreme, giving large bills to the homeless and even offering leftover meals to people she thinks might be homeless but who turn out to merely be waiting in line for a seat at a restaurant. Part of her efforts, including several failed attempts at volunteering, stem from the guilt she bears from the way she and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) make their living: selling furniture and other unique items that they pick up at estate sales.
The couple have less residual guilt for a waiting game they are playing: for their next-door neighbor Andra (the wonderful Ann Guilbert) to die. Alex and Kate bought Andra's apartment and will take possession upon the elderly woman's death so they can expand their own living quarters, something with brings them into contact with the granddaughters Andra raised, the cold cosmetician Mary (Amanda Peet) and the sweet-natured worker at a mammography center Rebecca (Rebecca Hall).
Rounding out the main group of this exploration of social mores are Sarah Steele as Abby, Alex and Kate's insecure 15-year-old daughter, Lois Smith as Mrs. Portman, a patient at Rebecca's clinic and Thomas Ian Nicholas as her grandson Nicholas whom Mrs. Portman seeks to set up with Rebecca.
This doesn't even take into account brief appearances by the always welcome Josh Pais, Kevin Corrigan, Amy Wright and even the great writer Sarah Vowell.
After an awkward gathering so the neighbors can get to know each other better, they find their lives becoming more intertwined, and not always for the best. Alex makes a trip to Mary's workplace for a facial which leads to an affair. Abby finds more comfort from Rebecca during dog walks than she does from her own mother who is more obsessed with helping strangers than her daughter.
What unites most of the central characters is some sort of existential emptiness within them that they all go about Manhattan in flailing attempts to fill. For Rebecca, it might be spying on the woman her ex dumped her for to try to see what she has that Rebecca lacks. For Kate, it's that neverending quest to help the less fortunate, even when she tries to volunteer with developmentally disabled children and just breaks down into tears and they end up trying to help her.
It's not explained why all the characters have been damaged and Holofcener's doesn't tie things up with a neat little bow, but she does draw a well-sketched portrait of her many characters which her ensemble more than ably fills.
There isn't a weak link in the cast but special praise much go to the great Guilbert who probably few will recognize yet most have seen. Well, into her 80s her career has included playing neighbor Millie on The Dick Van Dyke Show and Fran's grandmother on The Nanny. Andra resembles neither in look or character. She speaks her mind and loudly, thanks to being hard of hearing, and much of her "directness" is interpreted as hatefulness, especially by her granddaughter Mary.
Please Give really isn't a plot-driven film, more a multi-layered slice-of-life which overflows with humor and pathos. It's definitely Holofcener's best film so far and one of the year's most pleasant surprises.
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Labels: 10s, Altman, Keener, Television
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Monday, July 26, 2010
George Costanza's Dream Comes True in Cyrus
By Eddie Selover
A couple of years ago, watching Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, I was seriously offended on behalf of Marisa Tomei for her having to participate in some fairly explicit sex scenes. The problem wasn’t Tomei, who looks more devastating than ever in her 40s. The problem was that she was in bed with the last actor on earth who should be seen unclothed (even a little bit): Philip Seymour Hoffman. Though Hoffman was great as always, the physical disconnect between them made it impossible to suspend disbelief... she was acting all turned on by him, and man, that was some acting.
Now, three years later, here is Tomei cast as a “sex angel” to the lumpish, skeevy John C. Reilly in Cyrus. She hasn't had a relationship in years, the movie would have us believe, but she's attracted to Reilly. Uh-huh. To add insult to injury, she also plays the mother of the spectacularly bloated and unattractive Jonah Hill. The unlikelihood of either of these gentlemen getting anywhere near a woman like Marisa Tomei isn’t the main problem with Cyrus, but it was the one that irritated me the most.
Reilly plays John, a film editor who has been divorced for several years and lives alone in a messy apartment, eating junk food and staring at his computer screen. As with the heroes of so many of today’s slacker movies, whether mumblecore or not, John is a slovenly loser with no looks, physique, hygiene, money or career prospects… and who yet manages to have giddy, happy sex with a hot woman who responds to his sincerity, or basic decency, or something. Cyrus opens with John’s unbelievably non-acrimonious ex-wife Jamie interrupting him in the middle of masturbation; later he meets Tomei while peeing in some bushes. Are these the sorts of moments that bring hot women into a man’s life? Only in the minds of male screenwriters who have spent way too much time staring at their computer screens.
So John and Tomei’s Molly hook up, and things are going great until he meets her son Cyrus. Fat and beady-eyed, Cyrus is an antisocial lout who has an unhealthy Oedipal obsession with his mom and no intention of sharing her with a boyfriend. (Hill, by the way, looks more like the child of Danny DeVito's Penguin than that of Marisa Tomei, but let it go.) The first third of the movie is standard comedy-of-social-awkwardness as this situation is set up, but as John moves closer, and eventually into Molly’s house, Cyrus begins a passive-aggressive campaign to break up the relationship. For a while, with the handheld camera moving through the bluish darkened rooms of the house, it’s like a horror movie, and you half expect Cyrus to pop out with a knife like Norman Bates. Then for the last third, the movie makes another shift in tone, and goes all soft and sensitive as we see how much Cyrus is hurting, and he and John forge a tentative reconciliation.
This is one shift too many for the audience, whom I felt were ready for something darker and edgier. There are suggestions of an incestuous relationship between Cyrus and Molly — she spends the night in his bed when he’s upset, he uses the bathroom while she’s showering, etc. But these scenes don’t go anywhere, and Molly is ultimately portrayed as a sane, sweet earth mother who has evidently played no part in making her son a borderline psychopath. Like Mildred Pierce, her only sin is loving her child so much that she’s blind to what a monster she’s created. Or hasn’t created. Again, these are screenwriter contrivances — everything that happens in the movie is for an immediate effect and has no grounding in psychological truth.
The performers are left to make the movie work, and it must be said that Reilly almost pulls it off. He’s a very likable actor, maybe because of the glints of suffering in the little raisin eyes set too close together in his doughy face. We’re with him all the way, and when Cyrus begins his campaign of lying and manipulation, we want John to come up with some clever strategies to beat the little bastard at his own game. But although the movie makes a couple of feints in this direction, evidently the writer/directors Mark and Jay Duplass aren’t up to writing a battle of wits. In fact, much of the movie was improvised by the performers, and several scenes have that repetitive, vamping tediousness that improvisation gets when there’s no inspiration behind it.
Catherine Keener fares particularly badly — she has now officially tilted her head, squinted compassionately and laughed unexpectedly in one too many movies. She plays Jamie, the ex who dumped John several years previously, but still hangs around solicitously, trying to get him to socialize and find happiness in a new relationship. Uh-huh. Cyrus is like a loser’s daydream in which he doesn’t have to change a thing about himself: everybody loves him anyway. Even Marisa Tomei.
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Labels: 10s, DeVito, John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Keener, P.S. Hoffman, Tomei
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Monday, May 03, 2010
Bless the beasts and the children's book
By Edward Copeland
I can't even count how many decades and years it's been since I read Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. I can't recall the impression it made upon me as a young reader (if it made any), but I do know I remember it more by reputation than as a book. Now, I have caught up with Spike Jonze's film take on the tale and, like many films that deeply divided moviegoers into camps of vehement lovers and haters, I find myself standing on a middle ground, finding myself neither here nor there, and ending up with a rather middling reaction to the movie.
Granted, there always would be problems padding out a book as short as Sendak's into a feature-length film, but Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers did give it the old college try. It's just that, for me at least, I found little in the way of magic or the fantastic in the result.
Max Records turns in fine work as Max, the disobedient boy who runs away from his mom (Catherine Keener), at least within his mind, where he's crowned ruler of a race of large and strange creatures. The tale is not unfamiliar from many a children's story ranging from The Wizard of Oz to last year's Coraline, only there really is no villain in the fantasy world of Max's creation nor characters paralleling people from his real life.
While the design, look and creature design of Where the Wild Things Are impress, little else does. It also hurts sometimes when voice actors are familiar ones such as James Gandolfini, who chooses an inflection too close to his Tony Soprano voice. In a scene where teams are divided for a dirt clod fight and one is surprised with a hit in the back in the head and another creature says, "I saw that coming," I could have sworn it was a replay of the scene where Joseph R. Gannascoli's Vito Spatafore said the exact same line at a construction site after Eugene Pontecorvo (Robert Funaro) smashes a bottle against Little Paulie's face.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't think this movie was bad, it just didn't capture my attention or my imagination the way this type of film ideally should if it's to be a success. There's never a real sense of growing attachment between the creatures and Max so when Carol (Gandolfini) gets weepy as Max makes his decision to return to the real world, I never sensed a true connection that meant that much between them.
With a movie like this that divided audiences so starkly, I always secretly hope that I'll land on the side that loves it. It's even more disappointing when I find myself in neither camp just thinking, "So what?"
The biggest problems with these sort of reactions is they leave you with very little to say.
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Labels: 00s, Books, Fiction, Gandolfini, Keener, The Sopranos
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Saturday, December 27, 2008
To laugh or not to laugh
By Edward Copeland
When it was first being previewed, I have to admit that the idea of Hamlet 2 appealed to me greatly. I have a soft spot for bad taste if it's done smart and well and while the movie has a talented cast and a lot of laughs, it just doesn't quite get there.
Directed and co-written by Andrew Fleming who made the underrated comedy Dick (but also was responsible for the remake of The In-Laws), tells the story of an insanely committed high school drama teacher in Tucson, Ariz., who stages bad re-enactments of movies until he learns that budget cuts are going to mean the end of his department altogether.
He decides to write a bizarre, original show to save the department and purge some demons. What makes Hamlet 2 work as well as it does is it has an actor as insanely committed to the role of the teacher as the teacher is in Steve Coogan. He is a tornado of energy, a comic marvel as he spins from one situation to another from spoofing inspirational films such as Dangerous Minds while finding a worthy comic partner in Catherine Keener as his miserable wife.
Another great gag in the film is Elisabeth Shue as herself, who has supposedly quit acting to become a nurse.
There is a lot of politically incorrect humor in the film, mostly in the production they are staging itself, but unfortunately they don't show us a lot of it. I for one would like to see how Cheney figures in to the show and to watch the part where Satan and Dubya French kiss.
The big musical number, "Rock Me Sexy Jesus," is funny and I would love to see it get an Oscar nomination, though it still won't be as cool a nomination as "Blame Canada."
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Friday, November 02, 2007
Measure yourself at least once
By Edward Copeland
With Into the Wild, Sean Penn has made a quantum leap as a filmmaker. His previous efforts as a director, such as The Crossing Guard and The Pledge, left me pretty cold. In Jon Krakauer's book about the true story of a lost young man, Penn the filmmaker truly seems to have found himself.
Into the Wild also offers a chance to see the actor Emile Hirsch in a new light. My first exposure (that I can remember) to Hirsch was in Alpha Dog earlier this year, and he left me less than impressed. However, his work here, as Chris McCandless aka Alexander Supertramp, is quite impressive.
McCandless is a recent college graduate in 1990 with an eye on Harvard Law but buried resentment toward his stiff, WASP parents (William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden) inspires him to follow his own path: Living off the land in Alaska. As he tells one person he encounters on his journey, for Americans seeking new things, the road has always led West.
Along the way, Hirsch gets ample help from a fine ensemble of actors including Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Brian Dierker and Hal Holbrook who, with his role here and his guest appearance in season 6 of The Sopranos, may have become the go-to actor for representing aged wisdom.
Penn also wrote the screenplay and since I've never read Krakauer's book, I can't be certain if the words attributed to McCandless or to his sister Carine (Jena Malone) were truly theirs. Sometimes the lines seem a bit too polished, but they mostly work.
Cinematographer Eric Gautier offers a lot of stunning imagery and most of Penn's directorial touches serve the film well, even when they occasionally step over the line into being too showy (as when the word PEOPLE literally leaps off the page of a book Chris is reading). Penn also makes great use of close-ups, particularly in a tense, early dinner scene among the McCandless family.
Eddie Vedder's original songs for the film work quite well, even if they almost become indistinguishable from one another.
On the whole, Into the Wild may be a little too long, but it's so well made, well acted and well stocked with interesting ideas, that the journey is more than worth it.
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With Into the Wild, Sean Penn has made a quantum leap as a filmmaker. His previous efforts as a director, such as The Crossing Guard and The Pledge, left me pretty cold. In Jon Krakauer's book about the true story of a lost young man, Penn the filmmaker truly seems to have found himself.
Into the Wild also offers a chance to see the actor Emile Hirsch in a new light. My first exposure (that I can remember) to Hirsch was in Alpha Dog earlier this year, and he left me less than impressed. However, his work here, as Chris McCandless aka Alexander Supertramp, is quite impressive.
McCandless is a recent college graduate in 1990 with an eye on Harvard Law but buried resentment toward his stiff, WASP parents (William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden) inspires him to follow his own path: Living off the land in Alaska. As he tells one person he encounters on his journey, for Americans seeking new things, the road has always led West.
Along the way, Hirsch gets ample help from a fine ensemble of actors including Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Brian Dierker and Hal Holbrook who, with his role here and his guest appearance in season 6 of The Sopranos, may have become the go-to actor for representing aged wisdom.
Penn also wrote the screenplay and since I've never read Krakauer's book, I can't be certain if the words attributed to McCandless or to his sister Carine (Jena Malone) were truly theirs. Sometimes the lines seem a bit too polished, but they mostly work.
Cinematographer Eric Gautier offers a lot of stunning imagery and most of Penn's directorial touches serve the film well, even when they occasionally step over the line into being too showy (as when the word PEOPLE literally leaps off the page of a book Chris is reading). Penn also makes great use of close-ups, particularly in a tense, early dinner scene among the McCandless family.
Eddie Vedder's original songs for the film work quite well, even if they almost become indistinguishable from one another.
On the whole, Into the Wild may be a little too long, but it's so well made, well acted and well stocked with interesting ideas, that the journey is more than worth it.
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Labels: 00s, Holbrook, Keener, Sean Penn, The Sopranos, William Hurt
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Monday, March 12, 2007
Deja Tru
By Edward Copeland
Poor Douglas McGrath. Taking an oral history of Truman Capote's life by George Plimpton as his starting point, he set out to make a movie that focused on Capote writing In Cold Blood. Unfortunately, there was another little movie called Capote about the same time period percolating and it managed to get to a boil faster and earned its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman, a well-deserved Oscar for best actor. McGrath's version, Infamous, came out the following year and was inevitably compared to the much-lauded earlier version. It's a shame because while both movies are good, Infamous actually is the better of the two.
In Infamous, the role of the famous writer/social gadfly goes to British actor Toby Jones. It's a tough call on who wins the Capote battle between Jones and Hoffman. Jones certainly looks the part more than Hoffman and his imitation really is a more accurate one, but I think Hoffman gets underneath Truman's skin a bit more.
Still, Infamous as a movie is better than Capote. While Capote tugged more emotionally, Infamous has sharper writing, more wit and though I liked Clifton Collins Jr. as killer Perry Smith, I think Daniel Craig's portrayal in Infamous is vastly superior.
Collins played the killer too softly and with too much delicacy. Craig makes Perry a hardened killer without sacrificing his character's complexity or making it difficult to see how Capote falls for him. To see the same basic story told in two different ways in such close proximity to each other actually is quite fascinating.
Whereas Capote used such washed-out color that it almost appeared black and white, Infamous embraces color vibrantly, only slowly washing out the images as the film turns darker. It also benefits by the inclusion of "testimonials" by people playing figures in Capote's life such as Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) and Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich).
Of course, there is one other pair of performances to compare: The battle of the Harper Lees, and I think Catherine Keener in Capote bests Sandra Bullock in Infamous, if only because her role seemed more fleshed out in the first film and Keener didn't try to tack on a Southern accent.
While I think I might give a slight edge to Hoffman's portrayal, this is no slight to Jones, who really should have been considered for this year's best actor prize. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more I enjoyed Infamous than Capote. Though it's been more than a year since I've seen Capote, Infamous to me seems to paint more clearly the slow unraveling of Truman Capote the man than the earlier film did.
In a way, it's like the tortoise vs. the hare except, unfortunately, in the film industry, it's nearly impossible for the tortoise to prevail. One thing this double-barrelled look at this period in time has accomplished, at least for me, is a desire to re-read In Cold Blood.
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Poor Douglas McGrath. Taking an oral history of Truman Capote's life by George Plimpton as his starting point, he set out to make a movie that focused on Capote writing In Cold Blood. Unfortunately, there was another little movie called Capote about the same time period percolating and it managed to get to a boil faster and earned its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman, a well-deserved Oscar for best actor. McGrath's version, Infamous, came out the following year and was inevitably compared to the much-lauded earlier version. It's a shame because while both movies are good, Infamous actually is the better of the two.
In Infamous, the role of the famous writer/social gadfly goes to British actor Toby Jones. It's a tough call on who wins the Capote battle between Jones and Hoffman. Jones certainly looks the part more than Hoffman and his imitation really is a more accurate one, but I think Hoffman gets underneath Truman's skin a bit more.
Still, Infamous as a movie is better than Capote. While Capote tugged more emotionally, Infamous has sharper writing, more wit and though I liked Clifton Collins Jr. as killer Perry Smith, I think Daniel Craig's portrayal in Infamous is vastly superior.
Collins played the killer too softly and with too much delicacy. Craig makes Perry a hardened killer without sacrificing his character's complexity or making it difficult to see how Capote falls for him. To see the same basic story told in two different ways in such close proximity to each other actually is quite fascinating.
Whereas Capote used such washed-out color that it almost appeared black and white, Infamous embraces color vibrantly, only slowly washing out the images as the film turns darker. It also benefits by the inclusion of "testimonials" by people playing figures in Capote's life such as Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) and Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich).
Of course, there is one other pair of performances to compare: The battle of the Harper Lees, and I think Catherine Keener in Capote bests Sandra Bullock in Infamous, if only because her role seemed more fleshed out in the first film and Keener didn't try to tack on a Southern accent.
While I think I might give a slight edge to Hoffman's portrayal, this is no slight to Jones, who really should have been considered for this year's best actor prize. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more I enjoyed Infamous than Capote. Though it's been more than a year since I've seen Capote, Infamous to me seems to paint more clearly the slow unraveling of Truman Capote the man than the earlier film did.
In a way, it's like the tortoise vs. the hare except, unfortunately, in the film industry, it's nearly impossible for the tortoise to prevail. One thing this double-barrelled look at this period in time has accomplished, at least for me, is a desire to re-read In Cold Blood.
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Labels: 00s, Bogdanovich, Books, Capote, Daniel Craig, Keener, Oscars, P.S. Hoffman, Sigourney Weaver
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