Word: criticizes
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...indulge any cockamamie interest that goes skittering through your brain and pretend that you're working, solemnly patrolling the cultural ramparts, looking for miscreants, saboteurs and other freebooters. Wait long enough and the movies will provide what some people like to call "guilty pleasures," but which are, for the critic, entirely guilt-free. Yes, sometimes it's a bummer - an Irish romance (Once) which looks as if the cameraman and the sound guy were both DUI, or the entire Wilson family (Luke, Owen and Andrew) seeking and finding near-total witlessness in The Wendell Baker Story. But still, there...
...Which is what serious filmmakers do, especially in works shown at festival like this one. As a Cannes critic, I accept their right to undercut expectations; I hereby validate their modernist parking ticket. But there's enough of a movie kid left in me that I'd like to see this almost-great effort not go bust at the end, but climax in a great big bloody BOOM...
...hour later, before a screening of another worthy Asian film, I told my critic colleagues I'd skipped the Hou Hsiao-hsien film to watch Seinfeld fly over Cannes in a bee suit. One of my friends shook her head pityingly. "The things they make you cover," she said...
Winning it back will be a critical test of the U.S. military's surge in Baghdad. Under Saddam, Mansour and places like it--neighborhoods with names like Amariyah, Ghazaliyah, al-Adil, al-Khadra--were the purlieu of Iraq's educated Sunni élite. As security has deteriorated and sectarian killings have soared, those areas have been overrun by insurgent groups tied to al-Qaeda. The jihadists offer protection to local Sunnis against Shi'ite death squads in exchange for use of the neighborhoods to launch suicide bombings against Shi'ite civilians. But over the past few months, al-Qaeda...
...nobody, critic or informed amateur, is grousing by the end of the show, when most of the principals join in the 1951 skit-song "Catch Our Act at the Met," by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne. A high-art parody that's up there with Chuck Jones' Daffily Wagnerian "What's Opera, Doc?", the number combines parody, musical virtuosity and about a million laffs. As most every Encores! show does, it sends the audience out of Ciiy Center levitating on a contact high with the best in musical theater. At Encores!, the old shows are always loved...