More Invention Required. Something funny happened to Ricky Gervais on his way to becoming a film star: something funny stopped happening. THE INVENTION OF LYING starts as a fantastic original idea, fleshed into hilarious absurdity by Gervais, then slips in the puddle of Romantic Comedy – and you know what happens when you hit your brain on that pavement. In … Read More
THANK YOU FOR SMOKING
Black Lung Satire. Aaron Eckhart has always deserved to play a role as ferociously incisive as this. THANK YOU FOR SMOKING fleshes his latent silver-tongued devil in the form of Nick Naylor, a spokesman for Big Tobacco; the type of guy who could sell ice to Eskimos in winter. Movie opens with Nick on one of those daytime talk shows … Read More
THE STAND
My Favorite Martian versus Garth Brooks. This story should have stayed in our heads. Reading Stephen King‘s daunting 1000+ page The Stand (restored version, of course), nothing “visual” could intercept our imagination driving onto the wastelands of a dead earth, seeing an unseeable being (Flagg) in our mind’s eye, envisioning the disturbing horrors of the Lincoln Tunnel gridlock, the appendix operation, … Read More