Posted on October 26, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Dan Kois has a funny piece in Slate about the use of the word “bad” in so many recent movie titles. I love the movie posters Slate created for retitled classics. Would you see “Jaws” if it was renamed “Bad Fish?”
Posted on April 5, 2012 at 3:56 pm
My friend Dan Kois has a terrific profile of one of my favorite actors, Peter Dinklage, in the New York Times, who plays Tyrion in HBO’s Game of Thrones
e couldn’t book commercial jobs, because he wasn’t interested in the kinds of roles that paid well for dwarves. Specifically, he wouldn’t play elves or leprechauns. Even after Dinklage’s memorable first film role in the 1995 Steve Buscemi indie comedy Living in Oblivion
— Dinklage played an actor who’s annoyed to be cast in a dream sequence, demanding, “Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it?” — he still couldn’t get an agent. “Word got out,” he says. “I started to build up a resentment. And that fueled my desire to live in a cold apartment and be like: ‘I don’t need you! I’m gonna write poetry. Why would I want to be a member of your club if you don’t want me?’ ”
After a recommendation from Buscemi, the New York-based film director Alexandre Rockwell cast Dinklage in his shaggy-dog ensemble comedy “13 Moons.” When Rockwell met Dinklage just before his first day of shooting, they were instantly simpatico. “You might come in with some luggage about Peter’s physicality,” Rockwell says. “Right away he cuts right through that. You’re thinking, He’s a dwarf, he’s a dwarf, but Peter comes shining through as a personality beyond any kind of diminutive-size issue.”
“Alex attracts Steve Buscemi and Seymour Cassell and all those actors that are in his movies,” Dinklage said, then added with pride, “I’m one of them.” By the end of the ’90s, Dinklage was managing to make a meager living. “What I really want,” he told a theater Web site in an interview, “is to play the romantic lead and get the girl.”
Then Tom McCarthy, a recent Yale grad, met Dinklage when the actor portrayed Tom Thumb in a vaudevillian play McCarthy directed and co-wrote. The two became friends, and McCarthy was soon convinced that, indeed, Dinklage was leading-man material. “It was crystal clear,” McCarthy says. “There are qualities that leading men possess, this kind of self-assuredness and this vulnerability. Pete had both.” One day McCarthy and Dinklage ran into each other on a Manhattan street corner — “Peter was temping, and I was just scraping by as an actor” — and McCarthy later thought that Dinklage might be perfect for a script he was working on, The Station Agent
, about an introverted train aficionado who inherits a tiny depot building in rural New Jersey. “We never imagined,” McCarthy says, “that conversation would alter both of our careers.”
For a treat, be sure to see “The Station Agent” and his wonderful performance as a wedding planner in The Baxter
.
Posted on October 31, 2011 at 11:27 am
This must have been a lot of fun to do! Dan Kois put together a terrific guide to “Surviving a Zombie Attack” for New York Magazine, with all kinds of great tidbits from experts like the people behind “Walking Dead” and the “Thriller” video to neuroscientists (on the zombie brain), and with advice on everything from what to pack in your Go Bag to where to hide and how to find the best weapons by looting the museum.
Posted on January 13, 2011 at 5:21 pm
Thanks to Dan Kois of New York Magazine’s culture blog for including me in the round-up of the movies that made critics miserable in 2010.
Jean Kerr, who was married to the legendary New York Times drama critic Walter Kerr, once wrote about attending opening nights with her husband. She said that a critic will watch a terrible play and ask himself why it is bad but the spouse, who has no professional interest in that question will just ask herself why she was born. I think of that often when I watch movies so staggeringly bad that I can feel brain cells melt. I do ask myself why it is bad but sometimes I also ask myself why I was born.
Fortunately, a critic does have the relief of saving others from the train wrecks and, in pieces like the one assembled by Kois, the fun of finding words to express the excruciating pain of the experience and the satisfaction of assigning blame where it belongs.
Read it to see which movie a critic called “Camp’s ‘Gotterdammerung,'” which critic’s darling is deemed “a blend of a TV commercial and an acting class,” which movie is “pompous, interminable hash” and which is “Everything That’s Wrong With Self-Serious Indie Films, Ego-Tripping Star Vehicles, Disease-of-the-Week Oscar Bait, and Movies in Which Characters Are Haunted by Their Stupid Mysterious Past That We’ll Have to Revisit Through a Series of Tediously Oblique Flashbacks Until We Finally Say, ‘Okay, It Was a Car Crash! We Get It Already!'” One movie was given “bonus demerits from the cringing cowardice of its feel-good finale.” One critic was inspired to give his thoughts in iambic pentameter:
Dinner for Schmucks,” To note: One tends to want to like Paul Rudd.
Laughing out loud as I read the selections of the other critics (even though I actually liked some of the movies they named) made up for a lot of long, long nights in the theater and got me ready for another year.
Posted on January 11, 2011 at 3:55 pm
Slate movie critic Dana Stevens brought together an enormously engaging and thoughtful group for the annual “movie club” round-up discussion of the year in film.
Reviewing films is a lot of fun, but one of the drawbacks is that we have to react so quickly and specifically. I like the way Slate goes beyond the top 10 lists and “best actor,” “best screenplay” summaries of the year with a very robust conversation about the patterns discernible with a bit of distance and context and the opportunity to adjust and revise one’s views in light of a second viewing or just more time to think.
Dan Kois responded to a challenge to explain why he was the only participant who included “Black Swan” on his top 10 list, provided a hilarious flow chart with his reaction to the “trashy greatness” of the film. And I was thrilled by his shout-outs to two performances I thought only I cherished this year, Ginnifer Goodwin in “Ramona and Beezus” and Kathryn Hahn in “How Do You Know” — two movies I thought were badly underrated by critics and audiences.
“Inception” is a film that benefited from a some further time to consider it. Matt Zoller Seitz led off by noting that that critics reviewed some of the year’s other mind-bendy movies by saying that they were more effective than the high-profile “Inception.”
Clearly “Inception” is to 2010 what “Avatar” was to 2009 and “Titanic” was to 1997 and what the original “Star Wars” was to 1977–the box-office juggernaut that many critics find lacking, perhaps egregiously shallow and overrated, but that cast such a powerful spell over millions that they keep invoking it over and over to call attention to their own pets.
Stevens responded
“Inception” was more a series of sensations than a movie–the filmic equivalent of an interactive haunted house where you’re blindfolded and someone thrusts your hand into a bowl of peeled-grape “eyeballs.” Six months later, all that remains are the sensations, which is why the Hans Zimmer button brings the entire Inception experience back in a single BrAAAAAHMMMM.
I was most intrigued by the debate about Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere.” While friends I respect like Dustin Putman loved the movie, a tone poem that follows (I won’t say it’s “about”) a disaffected movie star and his young daughter, I found its neurasthenic preciousness hard to take. So I was very interested to see what members of the Movie Club had to say.
My views are most aligned with Dana Stevens: “‘Somewhere,’ to me, was a lovingly crafted, impeccably acted, but vanishingly slight little movie.” Stephanie Zacharek responded
Coppola has the lightest touch of any American filmmaker working, but she also has very distinct fingerprints. Her sense of humor is oblique, when it’s not downright odd. There’s that sequence in Somewhere where Stephen Dorff’s lost, disaffected movie star has been slathered with a chilly-looking mashed-potato substance as a prelude for some age-makeup that’s being designed for him. And Coppola and her D.P., Harris Savides, train the camera on that droopy white face (we hear Dorff’s noisy breathing on the soundtrack) for an inordinately long time, moving in verrrrry slowly. I don’t know that there’s an earth-shattering statement there demanding to be “gotten.” It’s like a knock-knock joke reinvented as a koan.
As with Dustin Putman’s review, it didn’t deepen my appreciation for the film, but it did support and deepen my appreciation for the critics and for criticism as a calling. Onward to 2011!
