With the New York Film Critics Online annual awards meeting only a
couple months away, I decided to make time in my busy schedule for some
mainstream movies. Instead of my usual fare of strident leftwing
documentaries and neorealist fictional movies from semi-peripheral
countries, I decided to check out some of the Hollywood blockbusters now
showing in New York. Of course, this does not mean going to something
like “Couples Retreat”, which for me is an experience more dreaded than
cataract surgery.
Instead I decided to check out the latest movies by “edgy” directors who
started out as indies. I fully expected to dislike all of them but was
pleasantly surprised by Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”, a
movie that I will review separately in conjunction with an obscure movie
about the General’s plot directed by G.W. Pabst, who was referred to
knowingly in Basterds. As you may know, much of the action takes place
in a Parisian movie theater commandeered by the Nazi high command that
speaks reverentially of Pabst and actor Emil Jannings.
The other two did not pass muster. Stephen Soderberg’s “The Informant!”
was based on a book about Mark Whitacre, a whistle blower who helped the
FBI nail top executives at Archer-Daniels-Midland involved in
price-fixing while he was embezzling millions from the company himself.
Despite the nominally socio-economic backdrop, the movie is much more
about Whitacre’s compulsive lying. If you liked Leonard DiCaprio in
“Catch Me If You Can”, then you might like this one. I had no use for
either film since the central characters were so off-putting and
difficult to identify with. Why spend eleven dollars to see movies about
characters that are so much like those who are running the country?
read full review:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/a-serious-man-the-informant/
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