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Wait a minute. This is a Pixar cartoon? Instead of toys, bugs, monsters or funny fish, we get a midlife crisis and, in the first half-hour, enough domestic strife to fill a Mike Leigh film. But yes, this is Pixar, the studio that pretty much invented and perfected computer-animation entertainment, with such spectacular success that it wiped out the traditional approach that its distribution partner, Disney, had virtually patented. (The two animation titans have fallen into a rancorous dispute that's likely to end with Pixar's boss, Steve Jobs, taking the company elsewhere...
This is, to put it mildly, unlikely material from which to fashion a near great movie. But writer-director Mike Leigh's Vera Drake is just such a film. He's famously a realist (Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies) and never more so than in this film. He simply recounts the story with unblinking objectivity. The almost comic cluelessness of Vera's family, the phlegmatic spirit of the policemen processing her case, the attitudes of her patients, ranging from the hysterical to the cool--they are all there. Yet there's nothing forced or movieish in Leigh's treatment...
...breakfast during the Democratic Convention in July. A long line of other White House allies, including Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, Treasury Secretary John Snow and Budget Director Josh Bolten, has also marched through the Dispatch's Third Street offices. Last month the President even invited Wolfe and Dispatch president Mike Curtin, along with a reporter, on Air Force One to discuss the issues...
...that the euro has exacerbated Europe's regional economic differences because of its one-size-fits-all monetary policy, with the European Central Bank setting the same interest rates for all. "In the short term, monetary policy is driving economies apart, not bringing them together," says London-based economist Mike Taylor of Merrill Lynch. A recovery is under way, but it's weak. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.) predicts that Euroland's economy will grow 2% this year, up from .4% growth in 2003 but well below the 3.4% expected for Britain and the 4%-plus predicted...
...Office's comedy of quiet desperation will probably need tweaking for America, where we prefer noisier desperation in our workplace satire. (A sublime example of that style is the movie Office Space, from Daniels' Hill co-producer Mike Judge.) But The Office finale isn't a downer; it offers the characters some hope and a chance at redemption--even David. At one point he shows up at Wernham Hogg, asking his ex-employees to go out for a drink--begging, really--in the mistaken belief that they love him. Only Tim accepts, to break the awkwardness--but also, perhaps, because...