Sunday Recap
• The latest reviews:
"But while that film was a cautionary tale of a young girl throwing her life away, The Nativity Story at times plays like an odd reverse: A coldly celebratory tale of a holy woman who’s utterly unmoved by her role in the fate of mankind. The joy here is spread too thin, and the resulting film never quite lives up its potential."
"Van Wilder 2 is a bad film, which is obvious enough in the fact that not even Tara Reid makes a return appearance, choosing instead to do an incredibly low-budget bowling film featuring Robert Carradine. ... I mean, seriously — how hard would it be to satisfy its core audience, made up of largely drunk college kid(s) who have to coordinate brain cells to make it to the theater on time?"
"I’m at a loss for the faux-genre’s newfound popularity, as the subject’s sick conceit usually relegates it to obscurity. Regardless, the provocation that torture-porn intends doesn’t make much of a difference when the direction and writing are as inept as they are in Turistas."
"In many ways the film is more like Almodóvar’s great works of the mid-to-late ’80s than his recent films, which have been less irreverently wicked and therefore considered more mature by many critics. But there can be no doubt that this is the work of a mature artist at the top of his game."
• Okay, in addition to being all romcom-ish and predictable-looking, the trailer for The Holiday adds a whole other level of dangerous wish-fulfillment by making you think that a guy that looks like Jack Black can land a girl that looks like Kate Winslet. And that's just mean and misleading. Stupid Hollywood.
• "He and his writers are building a world to live in, not a theory to unravel. It's a world that does more than transcend his show's silly title. It actually redeems it."
• "The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny."
• Because if you're gonna be tortured, you might as well distract yourself by having sex with the blonde robot that lives in your brain:
• Nothing this cool will ever be on TV again. Ever:
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