
6 Underground
It becomes repetitive, nonsensical, and just loud after everyone gets an origin story and we're left with nothing to do but go boom.
It becomes repetitive, nonsensical, and just loud after everyone gets an origin story and we're left with nothing to do but go boom.
Bombshell is both light on its feet and a punch in the gut.
Roger Ebert on James Ivory's "Howards End".
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
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Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An FFC on Gavin Hood's Official Secrets.
A celebration of Yasujiro Ozu, as written by a Far Flung Correspondent from Egypt.
An article about the International Beethoven Project's 10th annual Beethoven Birthday Bash, celebrating Beethoven's 249th birthday, which will honor Chaz Ebert with the Spirit Laureate…
The best films of 2019, as chosen by the staff of RogerEbert.com.
Bobcat Goldthwait makes a daring assault in "World's Greatest Dad" against our yearning to mythologize the dead. But he loses his nerve just before the earth is completely scorched. I have a notion his first draft screenplay might have been unremittingly dark and cynical. It might not have been "commercial." This version may have a better chance. Audiences think they like bleak pessimism, but they expect the plane to pull out of its dive and land safely.
Robin Williams is the star, demonstrating once again that he's sometimes better in drama than comedy. He has that manic side he indulges, and he works better (for me, anyway) when he's grounded. Here he plays Lance, a high school teacher, the divorced father of a loathsome teenager. His son dies by hanging and becomes the object of a cult of veneration and mourning at the school where he was a student and his dad still teaches.
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This premise is well-established because of a disturbingly good performance by Daryl Sabara as Kyle, the disgusting son. Kyle is a compulsive masturbator who makes no effort to conceal his pastime from his father. At school, he's a vulgar sexist, insulting girls in the corridors. At all times he is as angry and hostile as he can possibly be, and is genuinely disliked by the student body -- with the sad exception of Andrew (Evan Martin), his "friend" and victim.
Lance comes home to find his son has strangled himself. He has loved the boy despite everything, and now he attempts to rewrite the story of his death. He manufactures misleading evidence for the police to find -- and although he is a failed author with five rejected novels in the drawer, he now finds his perfect genre by forging a diary allegedly left behind by Kyle at his death.
This diary he posts on the Internet, it goes viral at the high school, and the student body is overtaken with remorse about the way Kyle was treated. Soon he becomes the deity of a death cult, led no doubt by "Twilight" fans, and students start wearing his photo. Lance is now seen as a heroic father.
The way this becomes an obsession is possibly the real point of Goldthwait's film. There's nothing like death to stir the herd instinct. For example, yes, Michael Jackson was a creative and talented artist. But was he as venerated a week before his death as he was a week after? Would anyone have foreseen the state funeral? What exactly did it mean when fans staged an all-night vigil at Neverland? Some were motivated by grief, more perhaps by a desire to participate vicariously in fame. Like sports fanatics, they seek identities through the objects of their adulation.
The Kyle cult becomes a tiger that Lance, the hero's father, has to ride. As he passes through the corridors, the path clears before him and a hush falls. He becomes much more interesting to his girlfriend Claire (Alexie Gilmore), a fellow teacher, who had shown alarming signs of growing sweet on Mike (Henry Simmons), a handsome, younger faculty member.
The only character who doubts the story about Kyle's death and his diary is Andrew -- the only one who knew him, and his onanism, at all well. Lance otherwise triumphs as he creates a fake son in place of his real son, and it all leads up to Kyle Clayton Day at the school. It is quite true, as New York Times critic Stephen Holden points out, that the phony death story has brought out the better natures of the survivors. My question is whether Goldthwait, the creator, after all, of "Shakes the Clown," started out with that intention. There is an inexorably black satire somewhere inside "World's Greatest Dad," signaling to be saved.
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This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
A Far Flung Correspondent weighs in on the MCU controversy.