Double Vision: Tony Scott's Spirit Possesses Ridley Scott's The Counselor (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

The rumblings of a critical debate (or is it grumblings?) have already surrounded Ridley Scott's The Counselor. A script by Cormac McCarthy (The Road) helmed by the director of Thelma and Louise should have been a sufficient enough marketing opportunity for 20th Century Fox to capitalize on as they rolled it out during awards season. And yet the studio held a press-only screening Tuesday night before its opening, a move which signals they're likely as mystified about how to handle the film as critics are in trying to build a consensus around it. Given how peculiar it is, this is not surprising. The Counselor is in many ways an anomaly for Ridley Scott.

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Movie Review: Beginners (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is a lonely graphic artist whose father has just died from cancer. He catalogues biographical events in still images, using references to history and popular culture as signposts demarcating one phase of his life from another. While he narrates Beginners, montages of these stills flash onscreen from time to time. It’s quite telling, though, that the catalytic event in the film — a conversation between Oliver and his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), in which dad comes out of the closet — is presented as an unreliable flashback in which Hal wears a purple sweater. Oliver admits his dad probably wore a robe instead.

Movie Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

I was one of many who wondered about the wisdom of remaking a film which was an international phenom only one year after it played domestically. After all, there was no way a prudish Hollywood version would be able to dive into the depths of the type of depravity that the Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel sinks the viewer into. As was the case with the American remake, Let Me In, though, David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo goes all in and maybe even further in both sexual explicitness and thematic scope. Surprisingly, it also provides further insight into Fincher's growing preoccupation with the breakdown of secrecy as a result of the increasing advances in information brokerage.