Child’s Play

What would happen if you took a typical suburban relationship drama and added third-person narration by the voice of NFL Films?

Drama would turn to satire, the same way Jane Austen’s authoritative voice turned slight tales of bourgeois romance into brilliantly observed studies of 19th century social mores.

Todd Field, the director of In The Bedroom, is going for a similar vibe in his strange new movie, Little Children. It is ostensibly about an extramarital affair between dissatisfied suburbanites Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson), but it’s really about the myriad of ways our culture’s exaltation of children can lead to infantile–or at best, adolescent–behavior in adults.

Leo the Cowardly Lion

Perceptive readers of this blog will know that I have my issues with Leonardo DiCaprio (it’s not nearly as extreme as my vendetta against Don Henley, but it’s significant nonetheless).

I’ve often pointed out how he has yet to be believable in any role where he plays an adult. Gangs of New York is only the most egregious example. While most critics tend to agree that he’s not a great actor, he is nonetheless often given credit for not pursuing the career of least resistance after Titanic.

He didn’t use his window as the biggest movie star in the world to star in dumb action vehicles or synthetic romantic comedies. Instead, it is said, he chose to become an actor and not a star, choosing roles based on their ability to challenge his talents rather than on their marketability.

The Departed Goes for Baroque

The Departed is wildly entertaining, but I’m not sure I bought a minute of it.

It’s been praised as a return to form for director Martin Scorsese but return to form of what? Scorsese’s great gangster movies from the ’70s and early ’90s were tightly controlled personal narratives grounded in psychological and social realism; The Departed is a sprawling, baroque melodrama. It has more in common with Face/Off than GoodFellas.

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= The Departed

The Matador is Bueno

I didn’t realize Greg Kinnear played the same part in every movie until I saw The Matador.

The Greg Kinnear persona is decent, optimistic and naive, a hard-working American family man who’s always the last one to get the joke. But when he does, he shakes his head and laughs that “you got me!” laugh. The Kinnear persona is clean-shaven, punctual and gregarious. His shirts are always tucked in.

On paper, this routine should be grating, but it’s not. I think it’s because Kinnear is so good at turning his Rotary Club smile into a look of genuine despair. In his characters, we get occasional glimpses of the anxieties that haunt the all-American dad: the bills he can’t pay, the lusts he secretly harbors, the fears of not being good enough. Sometimes, as in Auto Focus, the Boy Scout life disintegrates, and the Kinnear face becomes a disarming facade for sinister behavior.

In Defense of Kevin Costner

On my recent trip to Hawaii, I got in a heated discussion with my host–and loyal MOWC reader–Brendan Higgins on the virtues and flaws of Kevin Costner. It’s popular to think of Costner as a cheesy assball; after all, he directed and starred in two of the biggest bombs of the last 20 years, Waterworld and The Postman; some of his biggest successes, like The Bodyguard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, have been terrible; and everybody resents him for winning all those Oscars for Dances With Wolves (especially because it beat out GoodFellas, which is the far more beloved and watched movie 15 years later). In the documentary Truth or Dare, Madonna–no stranger to accusations of phoniness and bad acting–memorably complained that one of the pitfalls of fame was having to be nice to losers like Kevin Costner. That was 15 years ago. His reputation hasn’t gotten any better since.

All that being said, there’s a reason that Costner has been playing lead roles in American movies for more than two decades, since soon after he got in show business. The man is a star.

Why Singles Lingers

I saw about 46 percent of Singles last night. The last time I saw Singles, I saw 74 percent, and the previous time, I saw 31 percent. Like the best Cameron Crowe movies, once you’ve seen it once, it doesn’t matter how much of the movie you catch in successive viewings. While his narratives are subtly effective, Crowe’s greatest strength is crafting clever, insightful comic episodes that somehow absolutely nail what it’s like to be a young person in America.

A number of thoughts occurred to me as I took snack-like doses of this movie: