Kinematoscope

Guess what? We're going to take a weekly look at the reviews by Entertainment Weekly's increasingly befuddled and impossible to predict movie critic, Owen Glieberman. Recently, he gave A Christmas Carol an A while giving The Men Who Stare At Goats an F, though both films received middle-of-the-road reviews.

Fantastic Mr. Fox: A

OG claims to be "not a big fan of Anderson's work," but that the clay-mation medium was exactly what he needed to stomach the "virtuoso tomfoolery" and "arch self-possession" in all of the director's films. He sums it up thusly:

"Before, he twisted reality into a permanent ironic pose. Now, in the infectiously primitive talking-animal world of Fantastic Mr. Fox, he's become an ironic realist."

Points for the construction, Gliebs, but I really don't see how one who twists reality into an ironic pose isn't already an ironic realist.

Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire: A

He loves this one as much as everyone else, but I present the following passage about Mo'Nique's character:

"Her Mary is raging and defeated, a woman who treats Precious as a slave — and I don't use the word lightly, since part of the film's power is its perception that these two are living out patterns of cruelty that go back for generations. Their agony has roots."

It has ROOTS, get it? Like the show? Those italics are all original Glieberman, by the way. He also pontificates near the end: "Precious is a film that makes you think, 'There but for the grace of God go I.'" Somehow I doubt that young Owen, reviewing movies in the student rag at Ann Arbor Pioneer High School, was just a little bit of God's grace away from being exploited for welfare benefits by his parents.