Courtesy of SLIFR: Professor Hubert Farnsworth's Only Slightly Futuristic Holiday Movie Quiz

by Tony Dayoub

Let's cap off 2010 with another scintillating cinephilic census from Dennis Cozzalio, now posted at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Visit his site to post your own answers. My answers appear after the jump.

Movie Review: True Grit (2010)

by Tony Dayoub

Richard T. Jameson has an excellent piece up on his blog, Straight Shooting, entitled "also-true 'Grit'". You can (and most definitely should) read it for yourself, but in it he compares the new Coen Brothers film with Henry Hathaway's 1969 original. His conclusion:

So if I had to pick only one True Grit movie to take to the proverbial desert island, it'd be Hathaway's, Wayne's, Ballard's and, while we're at it, Elmer Bernstein's: that gentleman was Wayne's music scorer of choice in the Sixties, and the Bernstein sound laid over one of Lucien Ballard's high-country shots of quivering aspen and immeasurable, clear-air vastness imbues the moment with mystery. (The score of the 2010 version, by regular Coen collaborator Carter Burwell, runs variations on "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," a folk hymn best known from Night of the Hunter.)

The beauty of it is, though, that we don't have to pick one True Grit. Both are worth having. We take for granted that any Coen picture is going to be a work of impeccable craftsmanship, and yes, Roger Deakins is at the camera once again. The brothers' fidelity to [Charles] Portis' novel not only honors a great literary achievement but also makes for a narrative with fascinating interruptions, digressions and enigmatic encounters - in short, storytelling of a perversity the Coens usually have to generate on their own.

Like the book but unlike the 1969 movie, their True Grit has a narrator, Mattie, and keeps faith with her point of view. What she doesn't know, we don't know.

There are a few things I find particularly cogent about Jameson's review: his perceptive connecting of the Coens' True Grit to The Night of the Hunter; "What she doesn't know, we don't know..."; and, "The beauty of it is, though, that we don't have to pick one True Grit."

2010 Online Film Critics Society Award Nominees

From the Online Film Critics Society (of which I am a proud member):

The Online Film Critics Society is proud to announce its nominees for the 2010 OFCS Awards:

Somewhere, My First Piece for Nomad Editions Wide Screen

by Tony Dayoub

It's disappointing to conclude that writer-director Sofia Coppola’s latest, Somewhere, causes me to reassess her earlier film, Lost in Translation, in addition to her own potential as an artist. It's not that Somewhere is bad, or even dull. The strong performances by its two leads, Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, along with Harris Savides’s handsome photography of a lustrous West Hollywood give one plenty to admire. But the superficiality of a tale rooted in the privileged director’s navel-gazing overwhelms the tender story of the relationship between a young actor and his daughter.

So begins my latest review. Posting here has been light this past month, but it doesn't mean I haven't been writing. My piece on Somewhere appears in a new digital weekly, Nomad Editions Wide Screen, edited by MSN's chief film critic, Glenn Kenny. I am pleased that Wide Screen allows me to share the company of such highly regarded writers as Simon Abrams, Kurt Loder, Farran Smith Nehme, Vadim Rizov, and others.

Here's the concept behind Nomad Editions (which also offers both a food and a surf weekly, with other titles on the way), as explained by founder Mark Edmiston: