items tagged with Amanda Peet

IDENTITY and CONFIDENCE

By some bizarre coincidence, this past weekend saw the arrival of two new films, Identity and Confidence, that share an almost frightening number of similarities.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE

Punch-Drunk Love is exactly what its writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, claims it to be – “an art-house Adam Sandler movie” – yet I can’t be alone in thinking: What’s the point of that? Is Anderson merely trying to show up the hacks who’ve directed Sandler in other films? (Again: What’s the point?) All throughout, the movie is beautifully filmed, exquisitely composed, and filled with Anderson’s uncanny knack for stretching a scene out longer than it should humanly run and making you hang on every delirious second of it.

FRAILTY

Until it flirts with supernatural looniness in its last reel, Bill Paxton’s directorial debut Frailty is a strong, scary, deeply affecting piece of work – so good, in fact, that it easily ranks, thus far, as 2002’s finest film achievement.

HIGH CRIMES

If Hollywood studios absolutely insist on feeding us one piece-of-crap potboiler after another, they could certainly do worse than the trashily entertaining military thriller High Crimes.

DOWN TO EARTH and SWEET NOVEMBER

Is it a coincidence, or a frightening sign of flicks to come, that the two most high-profile movie releases this past weekend were remakes of movies that no one could have reasonably wanted remakes of at all? Sure, it’s commonly accepted that Hollywood has all but run out of fresh ideas, but to be subjected to both Down to Earth and Sweet November in the same weekend seems a little harsh.