items tagged with Todd Solondz

Last week, I received an e-mail from a reader asking whether I thought Ang Lee’s wildly acclaimed Brokeback Mountain would be playing in the area any time soon. She also referenced Capote and The Squid & the Whale – two other small-scale, independently financed films with a whole slew of end-of-the-year accolades and no current release date set for Quad Cities venues – and concluded her correspondence with a cry often heard from we Midwestern art-film fans: “Are we not grown-up enough to see these films?”

I AM SAM

How does one begin to discuss the blinding idiocies of I Am Sam? This comic weepie about Sam (Sean Penn), a mentally challenged Starbucks employee trying to retain custody of his young daughter Lucy (Dakota Fanning), is so shockingly offensive, both thematically and as a work of cinema, as to defy rational analysis, so here’s a brief checklist of what made me want to bash my head in: