What was the thinking behind these guys? That your average Visigoth would be too dazzled to do anything but ask for a photograph? The highlight for me, together with the hymns.
Last year the blockbuster moved inward, to ponder such questions as whether we are all figments of Leonardo Di Caprio's imagination. This year, the movement is backward, with the arrival of the retro superhero flick. First, in June, we have X-Men First Class:—The film is a prequel to the first three movies,[2] set during the early 1960s, with John F. Kennedy as president of the United States. X-Men: First Class parallels the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights Movement. The villains of the film will be the Hellfire Club.[3]
In 1942, Steve Rogers is deemed physically unfit to enlist in the U.S. Army and fight the Nazis in World War II. Volunteering instead for Project: Rebirth, a secret military operation, he is physically transformed into a super-soldier dubbed Captain America. With sidekick Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), he fights the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), Hitler's treacherous head of advanced weaponry, whose own plan for world domination involves a seemingly magical object known as the Tesseract.[9]
The New Yorker's Photo Booth blog is one of my favorite sources of great new photography. Above, one of Jeff Brouws Hopperesque images of roadside motels.
"Dad somewhat enjoyed being called gay. He said it made women want to prove the assertion wrong." — Jennifer Grant in her memoir Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant
"I think this should have been done long ago. Because a president has to put his public responsibilities before his pride and his privacy. That's the price of the job - to defuse or debunk conspiracy theorists or just skeptics with all the relevant information you have." — Andrew Sullivan*
I disagree. Firstly, it's been enormous fun to see the GOP self-destruct over the last few weeks. Trump is an enduring comic creation, worthy of Swift. Secondly: the same degree of proof that suffices for caucasians should suffice for African-Americans. Essentially, Obama has been forced to show his papers. Thirdly, I've just seen Trump on TV, crowing over the power he's just been handed ("I'm proud of myself"). For a brief second, he seemed less a figure of fun and more an actual living, breathing candidate. I'm sure it will pass but still. Lastly, nothing will see the end to this issue.
*For what it's worth I think the only reason Sullivan is taking this position is to reverse-engineer the legitimacy of his position re Trig Palin
Kate and I have been settling into the terminal gloom and splatter patterns of The Killing, which rounds out a day of good deeds and churchgoing quite nicely, we've found. I wouldn't say we love it but we're going to see this thing through. TV thrillers are more of an a priori commitment than cinematic thrillers, it being marginally more trouble to decide you don't like something and stop watching (What if it gets good in the final furlong?) than it is to say you do like it and carry on. I feel much the same way about the British Royal Family, who persist in much the same apathy zone, somewhere between 'I don't dislike them' and 'can't be arsed to figure out how to get rid of them'. Anyway: The Killing. Rainy, windswept, lots of imported Nordic gloom, as if Seattle were playing Denmark, or as if to say: To hell with Nora Ephron and her waterfront christmas lights. We like the leads, particularly Mireille Enos, the sullen, bruised-looking redhead leading the murder investigation and her unintelligible partner Joel Kinnaman, whose every second word gets tangled in his wispy scrubland of beard, never to escape. The plotting is a little high-handed, each episode boiling down to an hour of tense conversations in the rain, with occasional breaks for a spot of grief in a supermarket or Texaco station, generally followed, at the 60th minute, by an Important Plot Point, at which point the program exits with one swoop of its cape, thus lending credence to the idea that TV plotting consists not of spooning out dramatic events, but putting off dramatic events for as long as you reasonably can without full-scale viewer mutiny. It's bigger on mood — a seance session invoking the shades of David Lynch, Thomas Harris and Steig Larsson, whose presence is particularly strong in the exploitation of Goths as 1) creepy vampiric figures likely to lure your daughter into sex, drugs and assorted necromantic acts; also b) pale-faced seers who cut through the hypocrisy of adult society with the uncorrupted clarity of the outsider. The lesson: Goths may force your daughter into unnatural sexual acts but they are also represent a highly elusive and lucrative demographic that pop-dramatists would do well to cosy up to.
I cannot imagine I will hear a better debut album this year. The Belle Brigade are Ethan and Barbara Gruska, a brother and sister duo from the West Coast who seem to have spent the majority of their time on earth basking in the sunshine of Simon & Garfunkel and early Fleetwood Mac, and the remainder of their time crafting a series of exquisite So Cal pop belters which instill in the listener an irresistable urge to a) wiggle their feet 2) punch the air 3) check that no-one saw them do it and 4) grin. I don't love music much more than this. The whole album is first-rate, combining enormous craft, gusty raucousness, and gyroscopic harmonies that bloom and snap like sails on a windy day. These beauties sail. The track above — their first single — is one of the slower, more anthemic ones, with a beautiful lyric about..... well, if I say it's about the urge to quit the rat race, stop comparing and despairing, etc, that will sound trite, but just listen to the way the harmonies build and the thrashing of those guitars in the chorus: its got the urgency of someone trying to beat sense into their head. Oh and their grandfather is John Williams. I'm maxed out. A-
"The documents meticulously record the detainees 'pocket literature' when they were captured: a bus ticket to Kabul, a fake passport and forged student ID a restaurant receipt, even a poem... If a prisoner had a Casio F91W watch, it might be an indication that he had attended a Qaeda bomb-making course where such watches were handed out — though that model is sold around the world to this day. Likewise the assessment of a Yemeni prisoner suggests a dire use for his pocket calculator: 'Calculators may be used for indirect fire calculation such as those required for artillary fire'." — The New York Times
“The world laughs at us. They won’t be laughing if I’m elected President.” — Donald Trump
"He thinks like a child (that is to say, his judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem, and are animated by a child's eager apprehension of what feels just and true); he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius.... As a result, Christopher is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen....The prototype of Deep Blue was known as Deep Thought. And there's a case for calling Christopher Deep Speech. With his vast array of geohistorical references and precedents, he is almost Google-like; but Google (with, say, its 10 million "results" in 0.7 seconds) is something of an idiot savant, and Christopher's search engine is much more finely tuned. In debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes." — Martin Amis on the wit of Christopher Hitchens
1. TV host: "I can't understand a word you're saying."
Hitchens: "I'm not in the least surprised"
2. Two young men in a restaurant:"You're going to hate us for this..."
Hitchens: "We hate you already."
3. Friend: "You know, there are so few areas of transcendence left to us. Sports. Sex. Art … "
Hitchens: "Don't forget the miseries of others. Don't forget the languid contemplation of the miseries of others."
4. American: "Do you love us? Or do you hate us?"In all fairness, however, only the third has the quality of genuine wit. It is unexpected, funny, includes Hitchen's interlocutor in the joke and can be forgiven the hiccup of that in situ redraft ("the languid contemplation...."). The fourth response would occur to most people — the American set himself up. The other two are straightforward ambushes, in which Hitchens uses the civility of his interlocutors against them: they do not yet know that he hates them and — surprise! — in a cunning coup de grace, he reveals that he does. Conversation over. How admirable are these sudden-death flame-outs exactly, let alone "deep","Ciceronian" or "Demosthenian"? I have the greatest respect for Hitchens as a writer, but Amis seems a little over impressed with the hostility levels of his friend. Maybe he is fond of these comebacks precisely because they don't translate so well — they are funny from only one point in the room, Amis's, which is to say the point occupied by a forgiving friend.
Hitchens: "It depends on how you behave."
From the final scene of Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha (1972) in which Barbara Hershey, eerily prefiguring her role as Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ, runs alongside the body of David Carradine who has been crucified against the side of a train. Which is better (or worse), the actual depiction of Christ's crucifixion or the subtextual version of the same? I'm inclined to go with subtextual, except that of course, that the subtext never stays sub- in such instances (Dead Man Walking, Whistle Down the Wind), but leaps out at the viewer as boldly as a 3-D rake or broomstick. How about neither? How about: No crucifixions?
Melancholia, Another World, Larry Crowne, Crazy Stupid Love, Super 8, Terri, Submarine
"In this age of diminution and vulgarity at the movies, Malick conducts himself with the austerity of Chaplin and Kubrick – doing it his way, disdaining the press, but getting people to pay for it all. Never forget that a movie director is not just a master of imagery and drama, a conductor of actors, music and design. He is a guy who can persuade someone to put up millions on an airy conversation about life, plants, astronomy and philosophy." — David Thomson, The Gaurdian
Robert Pattinson can be a passive presence on screen, given to brooding, mooching, and sudden, slightly surprising bursts of pent-up emotion that come out of nowhere and leave you wondering why he didn't speak up sooner if he felt that strongly. The first Twilight movie exploited that passivity brilliantly, turning him into a icon of pale self-abnegation, smothering his instincts for fear of what they might do to his beloved Bella, although the sequels left him with perilously little to do, turning him into a Robert-Frost reading Romeo and roping him off from the action, leaving coffee-colored hunk Taylor Lautner to do the honors. He is not alone in this, for there is a streak of passivity running through many of the great screen lovers, from Valentino through to Warren Beatty, who communicates a fluting helplessness in the face of his own impulses — a man blown every which way by lust, like Wittgenstein's leaf. (Guy Pearce also got this in his recent portrayal of Monty Beragon in Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce). Away from the embrace of Kristin Stewart in the Twilight movies, however, Pattinson has sorely wanted for a costar who gets his hesitant rhythms, so good news! In Francis Lawrence's Water for Elephants, Pattinson has found her — a costar who lights him up like a lightbulb. Admittedly, she weighs a tonne, has an elongated schnoz and tusks that could break a man in two, but they said the same thing about Streisand in the remake of A Star Is Born. There are some, too, who will insist that the real object of Pattinson's affections in Water For Elephants is in fact Reese Witherspoon but anyone who has seen this movie will recognise this for the poppycock it is. Pattinson plays a vetinary student named Jacob Jankowski — can't you already catch that whiff of vodka and borscht? — who in the first five minutes of the film loses both his parents in a car crash, hitches a ride on a passing freight train and falls in with a travelling circus, whose sadistic ringmaster (Christoph Waltz) is married to a Harlowish bareback rider named Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) of the kind that men are always falling in love with in circus movies, and with whom Jacob is soon dancing cheek to cheek while Waltz snores, drunkenly in the corner. Given the sculptedness of both their cheekbones, this represents a considerable feat of engineering. Whether it amounts to good chemistry is another matter. Pattinson seems genuinely mystified by Witherspoon whose Tracey-Flicklike air of brisk, no-nonsense competence — she seems to be composing thank-you letters with every spare thought — is a million miles from the febrile melancholy that glued him and Kristen Stewart together. They seem almost a different species. Sia the elephant, on the other hand, actually is a different species but it doesn't seem to matter, as it didn't matter in the Twilight films. She plays an abused Pachyderm in urgent need of Pattinson's ministrations, and elicits some of his best acting to date: loose, spontaneous, tender, even — at one point — smiling. Big news, I guess: Garbo Laughs. It really is something to see that impassive masklike face cracked open by such a spontaneous show of feeling, as Sia gropes Pattinson's crotch with her trunk. "Is this how elephants flirt?" he asks. "Should I leave you two alone?" asks Witherspoon, a little nervously. Good question. Anyone who sees this film will, I think, be drawn to the conclusion, however reluctantly, that the cause of Love's Young Dream would be better served all round if Marlena made her excuses and left Jacob and his two-tonnes-of-fun to elope on the next train out of town, stethescope and trunk entwined. Sad to say, this does not come to pass, and it's back to slow-dancing with Witherspoon while his hand creeps up her back, and hers up his neck, at precisely directed increments: you can practically hear the director, Francis Lawrence barking orders through his megaphone. During the scene where they first kiss, in an alleyway, they manage to get there without once looking one other in the eye, like first cousins, or 12-year-olds in the school play wishing all this smoochy stuff were over. They're lucky they landed on the right lips. It's a handsome movie, though, beautifully shot with some great scenes of the train hurtling through the countryside at night — you can almost feel the temperature of the air — and Waltz is terrific as the circus master, switching between charm and sadism in that uniquely self-pleasuring way of his — when's he's charming, he's thinking of nothing else — so you're caught out every time. He makes acting seem an obscene act. C+
If you wanted to make a cartoon about a Brazilian blue parrot learning to fly — a great idea — but in addition to that needed to make the hero American, and thus had to find a plot that shoehorned those two separate journeys — first to Rio, and then into the air — then Rio is probably the best cartoon about (half) Brazilian blue parrots you could make. The film makes way more demographic than organic sense. The plot is all right angles, reroutes and restarts, so the characterisation has no firm perch. Jesse Eisenberg and Ann Hathaway spend most of the movie handcuffed together like Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps, but they're neither of them flamboyant vocal performers so it was hard to lose the mental image of Mark Zuckerberg nuzzling contemporary cinema's most doe-eyed Princess. (Hathaway doesn't need animating: she's pre-Disneyfied already). Leslie Mann does much better as the parrot's bookish owner: I never tired of catching the animated echoes of Mann's pert but expressive body language, a little reminiscent of Hepburn's in Funny Face as she lets her librarian's hair down and learns to samba (but keeps her spectacles). The film's most reliable source of genuine pathos, as she was in Knocked Up, Mann is not onscreen nearly enough. Rio has some swoop to it, thanks to a punchy color scheme and some snappy set-pieces, the best through the shantytowns of Rio, suspiciously cleaned up, but with those corrugated tin roofs doubling up as handy sleds, as we long suspected they might. The rest of Rio looks horrible, though, as soulless and bland as the cgi city in The Incredibles: the filmmakers needed to stick to the jungle and stay well away from the row of hotels by Copacabana beach but for some reason that I could not fathom out felt irresistably drawn back to it, like a tourist on a leash; and the eerily floodlit climax, set during Carnival, looks like a fascist beach rally: Albert Speer does the cha-cha-cha. If it had been me, I would have forgotten about including North America, started the film in the shanty towns and then dived into the jungle, where the hero could fall in love, learn to fly and do all the things Brazilian blue parrots need to do before their 90+ minutes are up. C+
1. Dazzling Blue, Paul Simon2. Civilization, Justice3. Take Me Back Again, Teddy Thompson4. Time to Wander, Gypsy and the Cat5. Cardiac Arrest, The Teddybears6. Fall, Lanu7. Dust Bowl Children, Alison Krauss and Union Station8. Lippy Kids, Elbow9. Container Park, The Chemical Brothers10. Amarillo, Gorillaz
The 82-year-old photographer Bill Cunningham, who photographs street fashion for the New York Times, now the subject of a new documentary by Richard Press, ekes out the kind of spartan existence which is normally the preserve of Samuel Beckett protagonist. Dressing in factory-worker blue tunics, and dining on $3 sandwiches he lives in a tiny rent-stabilised apartment in Carnegie Hall that is crammed with filing cabinets containing 4 decades worth of old negatives. Every day, he fetches his bike from a storage closet and sets out to photograph the women and men he sees on New York streets, tuning out the noise and traffic to capture a flash of ankle, a stylish cuff, a shock of pink hair — anything which picks out an individual from the rush-hour pixillation. In the evening he cycles to more prestigious, red-carpet events where he refuses to touch the food and drink, flitting from bracelet to bustier like a pollinating bee, before returning home at 2am and going to sleep atop a hardboard bed propped up by old magazines. His life is an experiment in elemental reduction, like that of a miser, except that unlike a miser, the emotion Cunningham has reduced his life to is not resentment, but pure, unadulterated joy. His face a picture of almost permanent surprise, his voice pitched as gee-whiz high as Jimmy Stewart's, he exudes a contagious exuberance which everyone around him catches instantaneously. He's like a cross between Stewart and David Helfgott — savantishly attuned to his own hummingbird frequency. He shows sadness only once, briefly, when Press asks him whether he's ever enjoyed a romantic relationship: the answer is no — he lives off the nectar of his work alone — but the sadness doesn't linger. There's not one iota of waste to him. Cunningham's gifts are too generous, his delights, like Anthony's, dolphin-backed: they rise from this film with the unmistakeable contours of a life well-lived. B+
From top:— Kate Shone, David Edelstein, Tom Shone; Joshua Briggs; Kate Shone, Farran Smith Nehme; Laura Jacobs, Tom Shone, James Wolcott; the guest of honor; Said Sayrafiezadeh; Michael Babb, Ruthie Vexler; James Wolcott, Tom Shone; Abdallah Ko, Emma Parry; chef Ralph. "What happens when a non-alcoholic starts going to AA meetings? A splash of cynicism, a dash of self-doubt and a good measure of humour, according to Tom Shone’s new novel, In the Rooms .... Mr Shone has a sharp eye for contemporary Manhattan, perhaps because he emigrated there from Britain himself. His skilful turn of phrase instantly draws the scene. You feel safe in his literary hands as Patrick wanders blindly down paths unknown, colliding with troubled people on the mend—gruff Douglas, friendly but crazy Felix and the intoxicating but damaged Lola... Mr Shone injects plenty of satirical laughs. Alcoholism is a sensitive subject, and he treads carefully the ironic line between tragedy and comedy... But behind the comedy he also muses on larger themes without being preachy: the American Dream, and how foreigners get sucked in by New York’s neon lights and either enjoy the ride or get spat out; self-discovery, a key aim for recovering alcoholics but also a universal goal; and man’s relationship with booze.... Mr Shone maintains a pace that whips the story back to reality. In the Rooms is an entertaining page-turner about humanity, with plenty of hilarity."
Oh the mixed feeling of tingly excitement and imminent catastrophe that is publication day! I say "tingly excitement" under advisement. Earlier in the week I was feeling nothing but lurking dread, a feeling which my wife patiently explained to me was, in fact, a feeling of pleasurable anticipation rather akin to Kundera's unbreakable lightness of being. The wiring in my head was wrong. Or I was misrouting something. Or misidentifying something else. I was very suspicious at first, as I usually am of any theory of my wife's that turns out to be unarguably true, peering at her with the skepticism of a skinflint who has had his clock cleaned by a Vegas Casino. But she was right. The day is finally upon me and the clouds of dread have briefly parted to reveal a small patch of blue; and in the middle of that patch of blue, a skylark, effortlessly looping the loop:—If you're a fan of Shone's movie blog (and if you aren't, what's wrong with you?), you'll discover a whole 'nuther side to him in his just-published novel In the Rooms, one of the few novels set in Manhattan that gives you a true feel for the city, the meteorological shifts of mood and status from one block to another, the subtle codes of manner and micro-inflections of irony that baffle his protagonist (a London literary agent named Patrick who decamps to New York after fizzling out in his native backyard), the sonic semiology of car honks, the secularly churchiness of AA meetings and brittle crunch of book parties.
"Martin Scorsese put down drugs and made two comedies and a film about Jesus. Raymond Carver quit the booze and produced Cathedral, an unexpectedly redemptive volume of stories, complete with allegorical blind men, praised by critics for the luminosity of its prose. Damien Hirst got sober and produced a version of the Last Supper featuring ping pong balls and a series of dazzlingly colorful butterfly paintings. Even Charles Bukowski, briefly sober to battle tuberculosis, found himself composing a series of poems about his cats and one about the “little bluebird in my heart.”I say,The headaches are biggest for the bad boys, whether bad boy poets (Bukowksi), bad boy painters (Hirst), or bad boy actors (Sheen). Theirs is the most humbling of climb-downs. Dark sides tend to shrivel beneath the pitiless fluorescent glare of the rehab; nothing shrinks the gonads more than the prospect of drawing up an amends list to the bats whose heads you’ve bitten off. Stephen King used to drink a case of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night—he can barely remember writing Cujo, he was so loaded—but after a family intervention in 1987, he finally sobered up, although arguably his work knew before he did. One of the things that makes The Shining one of the best books ever written about alcoholism is that it doesn’t know what it is about. It was an act of urgent self-diagnosis, conducted in the pitch dark. Once King shone a light into the closet and found out what the real monster was, his work took on a much baggier, more therapeutic feel, with less overly supernatural elements and more in the way psychological demons, metaphorical ghosts. His novels self-exorcised."
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?— from my article about sobriety and the arts for Slate
"Most actresses, given an anger scene, deliver a single parp on the self-pity blowhorn, but Wood--loosing arias of rage upon the head of her mother (Holly Hunter)--uncovered all manner of fear and heartbreak and doubt, all the stuff that anger is designed to cloak. “She has this music inside of her that allows her to hit different variants on a note,” says Redford. “Its almost like she’s daring herself to go further, but at the same time be on guard. It creates a great tension, and gives everything she does bite.” Wood is indeed unsettling. Ensconced in a penthouse suite at the London Hotel, a hair and make-up team flit around her in preparation for the red-carpet premiere of the HBO series Mildred Pierce, in which she also stars. She exudes an enamelled poise, dressed in a mauve Gucci dress and boots, her skin a flawless porcelain, her azure eyes staring you down with coltish defiance. As a kid, she used to delight in freaking out her parents theatre friends in Raleigh, North Carolina with her unblinking impersonations of Liz Taylor and Katherine Hepburn (“I just loved watching the look on people’s faces. They would be like: what just happened?”) and now, at 23, has already gone head-to-head with Kate Winslet (Pierce), Holly Hunter (Thirteen), and Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler). Her first rule of acting: show no fear."
— from my profile of Evan Rachel Wood for New York magazine. My review of Mildred Pierce here.
Kurt Vonnegut with Pumpkin, New York 1982, from an album of photographs showing writers and their dogs
"Her storytelling ability and word usage (coming from me, who has written many bestsellers), is not at a very high level." — Donald Trump, in a letter to the New York Times complaining about a column by Gail Collins
Who knew? Who would have guessed that all the ingredients that make up the Bourne thrillers— rogue American assassins, European locations, existential crises, kick-boxing — could be so seamlessly melded with a coming-of-age fable about a 14-year-old-girl? I guess such adaptability was always implicit; Bourne was one of the least macho action-movie franchise to come out of Hollywood in recent memory, prizing speed, agility and stealth over those walking armories — Schwarzenegger, Willis, Stallone — who staggered through the eighties and nineties with rocket launchers strapped to their biceps. CGI changed all that — changed the physics of movies. Suddenly, mass was out; the ability to dodge bullets was in; muscle-bound hunks gave way to slim, svelte ephebes like Keanu Reeves and Matt Damon, who could leap Tunisian rooftops in one bound and cling by their fingertips to two-inch wide ledges on the side of Swiss banks. The handover to 14-year-old girls was but a step away. Even so, director Joe Wright makes a long, glorious leap of imagination in Hanna, his intoxicatingly-directed thriller about a young girl (Saoirse Ronan), brought up in the forest by her dad (Eric Bana) to disembowel deer, snap the neck of humans, and order a capuccino in eleven different European languages. As much as Hanna enjoys memorising information about the imaginary German friends she is supposed to name upon being arrested by the authorities, however, she yearns for something more, like most girls her age, and is granted it when a little red light goes off on the desk of Cate Blanchet back at CIA Langley headquarters alerting the two women to each other's presence. Dressed in a sharp grey suit, with an equally sharp red bob, and a wandering Southern accent, Blanchet is basically reprising her role in the last Indiana Jones film and the repetition trips her up into self-satisfaction: she's too languid and purring, like a cross between a Bond villain and his cat, when what we needed to feel, I think, is the cold steel of someone going to work. For the first hour, though, it little matters. Hanna has a beautiful lift to it, shuffling its locations as if slaking Hanna's sheer thirst for the world. Wright wheels on Moroccan washer-women and Spanish flamenco dancers, Droog-like German sadists with scary blonde hair, and Ronan drinks them all in, her powder-blue eyes seeming to contain whole skies. I wasn't the biggest fan of Wright's Atonement, but the bits I liked the best involved Ronan, and the rapport Wright seemed to have struck up with this eerily self-possessed performer; here he bores in even closer on those azure irises, until at times the entire movie seems to take place behind them, in some enchanted place where the Brothers Grimm mixes it up with Robert Ludlum, and international intrigue takes on the flavor of a schoolgirl's jaunt. Best of all is a British girl, on holiday with her parents, played by Jessica Barden who delivers the funniest performance I've seen in a motion picture this year: haughty and heedless, her head teaming with boy bands and gossip mags and boob jobs and so exactly the kind of human being you don't expect to come across in Ludlumland — she seems to have wandered in from one of Mike Leigh's cheerier productions, rattling off her lines as if all these spies were intruding on her time, thank you very much — that my mind couldn't get ahead of the implications of her performance fast enough. I wanted her in every scene. I wanted her in every film I watch for the remainder of this year. In all honesty, I cannot imagine a single movie that wouldn't be improved by the presence of this imperious, round-faced princess although the new Terence Malick might have some maneuvring to do to make room. Lucky Malick. On the other hand, I could have done without the climactic set piece set in the Brothers Grimm theme park. I prefer my subtext a little more sub-. Wright had already flagged his film as a modern fairytale by the expeditious method of having Hanna read a Grimm fairytale in the first five minutes; I didn't need a character actually called Grimm, holed up in a gingerbread cottage, to drive the point home. His eye can be a little overcandied and in the final furlong, his art direction gets the better of his direction, with the characters almost seeming to pause mid-punch, check their watches, confer, then agree to meet up in another, even more splendid location to finish the job of kicking the shit out of one another. But the fighting is nicely done: Wright finds at least two wholly new ways of showing someone getting shot in this film. Two. How much more can you ask for in a film? B+
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