The Movie Filter

The Truman Show

March 21, 2006
By Jeff Roedel

All right you nonplussed members of the hipster literati, dogear that copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, take the kettle off the boil, because this week is your Super Bowl. The triumvirate of Capote, Everything Is Illuminated and The Squid and The Whale debuts on DVD today.

Hot on the heels of his Oscar win, Philip Seymour Hoffman turns Capote into a one-man show. On film, as in real life, the In Cold Blood author does not come off very likable. He was essentially a selfish, manipulative liar who used two sentenced murderers to catapult himself to fame while holding off his detractors with a quirky caricature and the ever-ready dirty joke. As a character study, Hoffman does an admirable job of portraying the conflict within Capote and the consequences of his actions, while keeping audiences interested in an unlikable lead. In short you don’t have to be a Capote fan to enjoy the movie. If you’re a fan of film, an Oscar-winning performance is a bargain at four bucks.

I haven’t seen The Squid and the Whale yet, but it’s written and directed by Noah Baumbach, the man who once convinced Wes Anderson that The Life Aquatic was a good script. Let’s hope that with The Squid, substance wins out over style, or at least comes in a close second. Looking at the trailer, though, it appears to be a new wave knock off of Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, right down to the warring divorcees, Lou Reed and all that tennis, only its set in the 1980s rather than in a J.D. Salinger novel.

Hey, good news everybody: After a year that saw creative independent films hog the Oscar spotlight, look for big budget blockbusters to come back strong in 2006! Actually USA Today has a pretty decent preview of the best of 2006 here

Finally, here’s the trailer for Art School Confidential. It’s from the same team — director Terry Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes — that made Ghost World, a film that single-handedly set the bar for offbeat comic book adaptations and unleashed Scarlett Johansson on Hollywood. I laughed about five times during this preview, and only one was at John Malkovich, an actor who really needs to drop the drama and start churning out dry-witted comedies.

Comments

Posted by malbat77 on March 21 at 11:23 p.m.

Nice take on Baumbach and Anderson, Jeff. You don't even have to see the movie now. You've got it. The ART SCHOOL trailer is hilarious. Hmmm, could that satire be applied to film school? DING! DING! DING!

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