Last night on late night, Martin Short and Cher horsed around with Dave, Anna Wintour put Seth Meyers to work, Conan talked with Nick Swardson and Helen Hunt, Dana Carvey showed up on The Late Late Show, and Kimmel got the Adam Levine treatment.
It’s not just that Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies tend to defy any one genre description; it’s that, often, it seems as if the writer-director is trying to play with many genres simultaneously. The only reason that Boogie Nights isn’t the best drama of the 1990s is that it spends a lot of time trying to be the best comedy of the 1990s instead. So Anderson’s newest, Inherent Vice, is a departure in that it mostly sticks to one style (sun-drenched film noir) and one tone (absurdist comedy). It’s also a fine film, which suffers only when measured against the insanely high standard that Anderson’s past work has set.
Even if you were not around during the 1970s, Inherent Vice comes across as a faded, nostalgic memory. Being a faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, the film recounts the dying days of the free love era, laced with the look, feel and paraphernalia of the subculture. Anderson’s comedic thriller peppers itself with restless, almost out of place laughter, while dedicating itself to the themes of the early Seventies. One is reminded of private-eye classics such as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, with traces of Zucker-Abrahams comedies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun. For many, the homage to 1970s filmmaking will be a very real and thrilling look down memory lane. For others, it’ll be a history lesson like no other found in modern day filmmaking.
Innerspace Written by Chip Proser and Jeffrey Boam Directed by Joe Dante USA, 1987 Science fiction is a genre in which anything is possible. Films in particular take advantage of this opportunity to transport its audience to new worlds and new ideas. In 1987, director Joe Dante and executive producer Steven Spielberg took us on …
Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return Written by Adam Balsam and Randi Barnes Directed by Will Finn and Daniel St. Pierre USA, 2014 Roughly a minute after the opening credits of Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return end, the Lion (no longer Cowardly) not-so-playfully threatens to give the Tin Man an “oil change.” Although this is but …
Maybe Tim Burton should stick to stop-motion animation from now on. Some of his most creative films, his biggest qualitative successes, haven’t been in live-action or overdosed on computer graphics. You may think of him as the director of Batman or of Beetlejuice, but Burton’s impact is most powerfully felt in the 1993 Disney film …
Frankenweenie Written by John August, story by Tim Burton and Leonard Ripps, based on Tim Burton’s short film Frankenweenie Directed by Tim Burton USA 2012 imdb A feature-length, black and white 3-D animated expansion of his original black and white live action short film, Frankenweenie is an amazing technical achievement by Tim Burton. The film looks fantastic and for …