items tagged with Being Julia

THE PACIFIER

There’s a moment in the Vin Diesel family comedy The Pacifier that should have really pissed me off, but instead it made me almost unaccountably happy: About midway through the film, Diesel, playing a former Navy SEAL entrusted with the safety of five fatherless youths (you’ve seen the trailers, you get the idea), enters their suburban digs covered in raw sewage, the victim of a practical joke pulled by the family’s oldest siblings.

SIDEWAYS

Alexander Payne’s Sideways is so chockfull of good humor and emotional accuracy that you leave the theater overwhelmed and a bit giddy; it feels like a movie that you, alone, discovered, and want to share with friends immediately.

Before assessing the Hollywood output designed to fill us all with holiday cheer (Jerry Bruckheimer’s action extravaganza, Oliver Stone’s historical war epic, Tim Allen after a Botox injection ... y’know, that sort of thing), let’s take a brief look at a few titles flying a bit beneath the blockbuster radar.