Word: film
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...this fact or fantasy? At the beginning of the film, we are told, "More of this is true than you would believe." And as a military device, remote viewing is surely no wackier than detecting weapons of mass destruction in a country that didn't have any. But as written by Peter Straughan (who also connived in the movie botch of the nonfiction book How to Lose Friends & Alienate People) and directed by Grant Heslov (screenwriter on the Clooney-directed Good Night, and Good Luck), Goats strains as hard to find a coherent comic craziness as Cassady does to make...
This time of year, the salesman goes on the road to showcase his new wares at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. He showed up last week on the Lido, a couple of hundred miles from his vacation villa on Lake Como, both to present his Iraq war comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats and to unveil his new inamorata, TV presenter Elisabetta Canalis. When the film broke down at the evening screening, Clooney serenaded the audience with a comic-opera rendition of O Sole Mio that wouldn't make Placido Domingo envious but did wow the crowd. This...
Read "Glitz and Glamour at the Venice Film Festival...
Stay through the end credits of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man and you'll find the disclaimer: "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." That statement is open to dispute, since most of the film's characters are Jewish - residents of suburban Minneapolis in 1967 - and just about all of them, it seems, are out to harm the Coens' hapless hero, college physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), either intentionally or just by ignoring his mostly mute cries for help...
...Jews and gentiles, that assembles around Larry is full of these caricatures. And Larry was made to be intimidated, ignored, abused. He is a passive protagonist whose plight earns him as much pity as sympathy. So A Serious Man, which has its world premiere tonight at the Toronto Film Festival before opening in theaters Oct. 2, is a rare event in movies, where action is character. It's certainly rare for the Coens, in that this is one fable - Miller's Crossing might be another - that is worth taking seriously. (See the 10 best Coen brothers moments...