items tagged with Dead Poets Society

NO STRINGS ATTACHED

Against all expectations, at least my expectations, director Ivan Reitman’s No Strings Attached is a perfectly enjoyable piece of midwinter fluff, engaging and breezy and of no consequence whatsoever. Yet I’ll admit to being somewhat shocked when, two days after seeing it, I replayed the notes I quietly recorded during my screening, and discovered that I didn’t whisper even one criticism or complaint in the whole of its 105 minutes, which is a claim I can’t even make about The Social Network.

Then again, the movie is a formulaic romantic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher, so I suppose the complaints do take care of themselves.

Are mainstream movies, in general, becoming more and more stale? The question arose a couple of weeks ago when an acquaintance asked if I’d seen anything good recently. After a pause I was finally able to reply, “Uh ... Return of the King?”

“Well, of course that. Anything since then?”

LOVE ACTUALLY

If you are to believe the (mostly) glowing responses to Love Actually, writer-director Richard Curtis has compressed material for a half-dozen romantic comedies into one, creating, in the words of one reviewer, “an epic romantic comedy.” But that’s not exactly accurate. For his first directorial outing, Curtis – the clever, funny screenwriter of Four Weddings & A Funeral and Notting Hill – has apparently decided to take every idea he’s ever had, every last one, and blend them into a frothy, holiday-themed confection; it’s less an epic romantic comedy than a romantic comedy shaped as an epic (which isn’t the same).

DIE ANOTHER DAY

In lieu of trying to detail the plot of the latest James Bond vehicle, Die Another Day – really, does it matter? – let me instead run a short list of what makes Lee Tamahori’s outing my favorite Bond flick in, I dunno, at least 20 years: