We Need to Talk About We Need to Talk About Kevin
There are films meant to scare, and there are films meant to disturb, and come Halloween I’m much more inclined toward the latter. The scariest films I know of aren’t actually meant for fright-fest marathons. The everyone-hits-rock-bottom sequence in Requiem for a Dream, for instance, unsettles me way more than Freddy Krueger wielding a glove of knives at some horny teenagers. I shut my eyes in fear of losing sleep when the dead baby...
Cheesyball
A Retrospective Review of Moneyball “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” asks Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) in the penultimate scene of Moneyball, echoing his earlier declaration that “it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.” Perhaps the reason the theme gets underlined is because the makers of Moneyball themselves ran into this problem a lot during production. Indeed, the source material, Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The...
A Meditation on the End of the Government Shutdown
I visited home this past weekend. There’s very little to do in my hometown, and I spent the lion’s share of the time watching TV (I don’t have a TV at my apartment in Tucson, so it’s a rare treat to check out what’s on cable, let alone network shows). Two things were playing ad nauseum more or less every time I sat down to watch. Since the government shutdown ended the day before my plane landed in New Jersey, one of those two things...
Family Values Tour: Trophy Wife
Hopefully, what we have to look forward is stuff like ABC’s Trophy Wife, which in its tone and wit reminds me of the way-underrated Suburgatory. It’s not that Trophy Wife doesn’t do a lot of the things I’ve already claimed that contemporary (and, let’s face it, traditional) family sitcoms do: it affirms family values, its central family is so white you need sunglasses to watch them, they live in a comfortable upper-middle class...
Family Values Tour: Dads
Dads is bad. Dads is painfully, totally, in spots off-the-charts bad, made with the kind of primitive humor and style that makes you wonder whether anyone involved had ever seen a sitcom before. It’s the only multi-camera, laugh-track sitcom of the lot here, but that’s not what makes it regressive. It regresses to a time long before the advent of multi-camera sitcoms. Dads’ premise is simple enough: two guys (Seth Green and...