A bit of excellent movie writing

6 comments January 29th, 2009

From Anthony Lane’s review of TAKEN in The New Yorker…

The first sentence…

 ”The conundrum posed by TAKEN is as old as cinema itself. Do stars degrade themselves when they take a role in trash, or does their very presence redeem the folly, turning up something that glitters amid the dross?”

And this choice bit…

“Pausing only to borrow a private jet from his ex’s slimy husband, Mills (Liam Neeson) flies to Paris, where he proceeds to work his way, without mercy, through a personal alphabet of undesirable aliens. This being a brisk affair, of little more than ninety minutes, he gets only as far as Albanians and Arabs, but, if I were an innocent Bermudan, let alone a Belgian, I would be starting to get nervous about a sequel.”

Read the whole thing here.

Your WATCHMEN post of the day

3 comments January 29th, 2009

I haven’t posted anything about WATCHMEN lately, so here’s the video that’s been making the rounds of the Internet: A fake newscast celebrating the 10th anniversary of WATCHMEN’s godlike super hero, Dr. Manhattan.

 

As if I needed another reason to be excited about this movie, this clip does the job. Also, I paged through a copy of the new book WATCHMEN: THE FILM COMPANION and had to stop after a few pages so as not to spoil any surprises. But what I saw looked good — very good.