Add “romance” to your next grocery list.
According to a map of the most common Craigslist missed connection locations, most Americans are looking for love while running errands.
For Psychology Today, Dorothy Gambrell mapped out the most common missed connection locations by state. Her study, which was based on each state’s most recent 100 Read More
In A Late Quartet, a somber, moody and uneven film about chamber music and the dedicated professional musicians who devote their lives to playing it, Christopher Walken takes some getting used to as a renowned cellist with Parkinson’s disease who is forced begrudgingly to end his career as leader of one of the world’s most celebrated string quartets. A far cry from the lurid and sloppy addicts, psychopaths and serial killers he usually plays as though walking in his sleep, it’s not the kind of role I would personally think of as perfect casting for him. Also, the movie is too slow, highbrow and sophisticated to draw the youth market that loves to see Mr. Walken play violent and stoned in trash like Seven Psychopaths. But playing the cello is such a pleasant change of pace that he eventually grows on you, scene by scene, proving for the first time since his role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled father 10 years ago in Catch Me If You Can, that he really can act. He—along with the rest of the elegant cast—keeps A Late Quartet in tune when it threatens to go flat. Read More
The last film by novice indie director Ry Russo-Young was an empty bottle called You Won’t Miss Me, about an alienated 23-year-old misfit just released from a psychiatric hospital. Her new film, Nobody Walks, is an empty bottle about an alienated 23-year-old misfit from New York who is making a video about insects for her art thesis. She seems to have a thing for 23-year-old misfits. Too bad she can’t find a way to make a movie about them that will keep anyone awake. Co-written by Lena Dunham, whose TV sitcom Girls is another guaranteed cure for insomnia, Nobody Walks is 82 minutes long—and I was snoozing 30 minutes in. This is not good for anyone anxious to build a reputation or entertain an audience. Read More
In an age of idiotic garbage overpopulated with alternate realities and toxic avengers in Halloween costumes, I cannot tell you how touching, restorative and vitamin-enriching it is to see a gentle, tender and intelligent film with A-list stars playing real people dealing with real problems in the everyday world. Instead of stupid gags and punchlines, Hope Springs is a character study in elegiac pastels about how people love, then change and eventually drift away from each other—and the daunting energy it takes for them to get their old mojo back while the apple still bites. Separately, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones are national treasures, but together they are simultaneously spectacular and intimately awe-inspiring. I have never loved either one more. Read More
If you’re an actor looking for work, it helps to have a girlfriend who is a writer. So Paul Dano, whose dour, limburger face is matched only by a charisma that is the screen equivalent of road kill, is a lucky fellow. His roommate and offscreen squeeze, Zoe Kazan, has provided them both with the screenplay to Ruby Sparks, an engaging if lightweight romcom directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team that hit pay dirt with Little Miss Sunshine. This one passes the time pleasantly enough, but history isn’t likely to repeat itself. The script is breezy, but neither of the two leads have the heft or charm to carry an entire feature-length film—separately or together. I kept wondering, while glancing at my watch, what it would have been like with Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, or James Wolk and anybody.
The morose Mr. Dano plays Calvin Weir-Fields, a shy novelist in horn-rimmed glasses who wrote a best-seller at 19 but now suffers painfully from writer’s block. Well, naturally; it’s ten years later, and he doesn’t even own a computer. So emotionally underdeveloped that his shrink (welcome back, Elliot Gould) gives him a fuzzy stuffed toy to cuddle with on the couch while he’s being analyzed, Calvin is awkward, socially inept and unable to get laid. So along comes a girl he calls Ruby Sparks, who falls in love with him faster than he can speed-dial his own cell phone. There’s just one snag. She exists only in his imagination. Read More
With so much mediocre junk currently polluting both stage and screen, it’s encouraging to visit the modest but robustly entertaining new musical Dogfight at Second Stage. Under the solid direction of Joe Mantello, and based on the honest, compelling, enthusiastically received 1991 movie of the same name directed by Nancy Savoca that starred River Phoenix and Lili Taylor, Dogfight is about love and loneliness, coming of age under pressure, and two young misfits struggling for identity despite the cruelty of rejection. Read More
The Magic of Belle Isle is a warm, human, feel-good experience about bringing out the best in people, one that brings out Morgan Freeman’s best performance in years. He plays a grizzled old drunk named Monte Wildhorn, a once-revered author of epic western novels suffering from writer’s block who has become so miserable and depressed since losing his wife to cancer that he has retired his career to the inside of a bottle of sour mash whiskey. Cynical, reclusive and partially dependant on a motorized wheelchair, he has come to a small lakeside community in upstate New York to escape from the pressures of responsibility, reality and people—by drinking himself into a stupor. Unfortunately, the summer house his nephew has found for him to hide away in comes equipped with a dependant dog named Ringo the owner left behind, an annoyingly friendly community of covered-dish suppers and a compassionate next-door neighbor named Charlotte O’Neil (Virginia Madsen), a single mom with three daughters. Read More
McCarren Pool may be located at the epicenter of hipsterdom on the border between Williamsburg an Greenpoint, but its reopening has brought on a strange, unfamiliar feeling in such environs: an earnest, completely unironic, swooning kind of love.
“The tide of consensus has turned,” Charles Graeber, a 42-year-old freelance writer who attended the pool’s opening yesterday told The New York Times. “People are really rather proud. This is a very hopeful, grand, Great Society gesture. Williamsburg is famously hipsterish, sneering and ironic, but there’s nothing ironic about this.” Read More
People Like Us is a conveyor belt romcom about a tough tomato with a kid to raise, calloused by life’s shin kicks and cynical with despair, who falls in love at last with the perfect guy she’s waited for her entire life, unaware that he’s really her brother. It sounds awful, but the big surprise is that in spite of its too-obvious directorial flaws, it has an emotional impact (for me, anyway) I can’t resist, reinforced by the guileless chemistry of a perfect cast and the genuine humanity in the script. In a summer overloaded with numbing junk movies masquerading as gum-chewing blockbusters, this is a rare feel-good treat that nudges the heartstrings and makes you feel optimistic about the human race. Read More
Don’t worry about floods, earthquakes or burning to death in an apocalyptic fire. When the end comes, protect yourself with love. This is the message conveyed in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s feature film debut. It’s an intriguing take on the apocalypse as a pragmatic tone poem, with comedian Steve Carell in his first deeply dramatic role (at least, the first one I’ve seen). He is very touching and unexpectedly appealing, and with co-star Keira Knightley he exhibits a romantic chemistry of which I never thought him capable. Read More
