Steve Carell
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Of Human Bondage: The Big Short
Adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay from The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis’s behind-the-scenes book about the 2008 housing market crash, McKay’s star-stuffed The Big Short is a brilliant demystification. Two scenes, hilarious in completely opposite ways, take place in the middle of an otherwise enervating securitization session at the American Securities Forum in Las Vegas. Hold on: hilarious and securitization jammed into the same sentence? Most people don’t even know what the latter word means. When a term completely sidesteps consciousness, it is probably unavailable to the unconscious—site of the split-second manufacture of humor. To […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 11, 2015 -
“It’s Such a Weird Story”: Bennett Miller on Foxcatcher
When I wrote about Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher a couple of months ago after seeing it at the Telluride Film Festival, I called it “extraordinary… a subtle yet extremely unnerving examination of how family, class, and competition inform and are informed by the American dream.” There’s always a little danger in writing about a movie in the heat of film festival hysteria, as one can easily overrate (or underrate) a film under the pressure of weighing in with an immediate opinion. In the time since Telluride, however, my admiration for Foxcatcher has only grown upon reflection; the supremely confident restraint of Miller’s visual style and the psychologically and […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 13, 2014
