The Spectacular Now Movie Review

James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now is a refreshing depiction of teenage life, friendship, romantic relationships, and angst. Its main character, Sutter (Miles Teller), is the school’s life of the party. He’s fun and funny, popular among the ‘right’ people, and has an on again-off again beautiful girlfriend, who looks like the all-American Homecoming Queen. Like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, this is as close to the spirit of John Hughes as we’ve seen, in the sense of a writer who gets the voice and troubles of the American teenager.

From My Collection: The Hudsucker Proxy Movie Review

Full disclosure: I’m an almost shameless lover of the Coen brothers. There’s hardly a film they’ve made that I don’t like and with one exception, I own every one of their films on DVD. That doesn’t mean I’m blind to the things that don’t work and the films that fail in some very important aspects. With that said, The Hudsucker Proxy was always a film I liked for its quirky Coen-ness, but clearly I wasn’t crazy about it because it took me fourteen years after I got my first DVD player (and nineteen years after the film was released) to purchase a copy.

Greenberg Movie Review

If writer/director Noah Baumbach’s latest feature, Greenberg, feels a bit directionless, that’s probably because the title character, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), has lost focus after a breakdown and brief stay in a psychiatric ward. Come to think of it, Baumbach sort of specializes in directionless characters beginning with his first film, Kicking and Screaming, about four recent college graduates unwilling to go forth and take their places in the world. Roger Greenberg could be any one of those characters fifteen years later.