Finally got around to Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.  Not as good at The Royal Tenenbaums, but in the same baroque/deadpan style.  Weighed down by Owen Wilson’s so-bad-it’s-just-bad "Southern" accent (and overall superfluousness), Anjelica Huston’s so-deadpan-it’s-just-dead performance (in a small but central role), and so-cheesy-they’re-not-ironic-they’re-embarrassing CGI effects (which feature heavily in the…

Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is the video version of those sour candies kids like–it’s so excruciating it’s hard to watch.  But if you’re an occasionally irritable, mildly misanthropic, middle-aged married man who’s been known to embarrass himself or say the wrong thing at a dinner party every once in a while, you can’t not…

Although Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven came out in 1992, I saw it for the first time just the other night.  It’s not perfect (for starters, Lennie Niehaus’ score is the worst I’ve ever heard in a serious movie), but it pulls off one very impressive trick: At the climactic scene (a shootout in a bar, of…

I didn’t watch Carson much until his last few years on the Tonight Show.  As a kid and college student, I preferred Letterman’s edgy irony, but as I grew older, I found Carson’s softer approach more appealing, and I began to appreciate his sly wit and easy self-confidence.  (Uh, and I started going to bed…

I just watched "The Bishop’s Wife," a light-hearted Christmas flick from 1947 starring Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young, and found it surprisingly moving on several levels.  The bullet: David Niven is Bishop Henry Brougham, straining under the burden of trying to raise money for a grand cathedral, Loretta Young is his devoted wife…