The News: The Long and Short of It

The 2007 World Series opens tonight in Boston, where crafty lefty Chewbacca got some work in with pitching coach Leia Organa.

By S.T. VanAirsdale

Some of today's movie news of note from around New York:

--"If long movies make us squirm or yawn, it's not because they aren't short, but because they aren't full." So writes Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal, perfectly encapsulating my own antipathy toward the sprawling excess of contemporary American cinema. And while he rightfully defends the dense, protracted frameworks of recent polarizers like The Assassination of Jesse James, it bears noting that fall movies aren't the only works prone to gluttony; think about if Knocked Up had just trimmed 15 minutes of set-up, chatter and montage. It could have been among the best of '07. Hollywood, please: Stop the madness. (H/T: Anne Thompson)

--Another old-schooler with a point is David Ansen, the Newsweek critic who this week waxes, well, old about his detailed record of movies he's viewed since he was 12. Part self-indulgent navel expedition and part anthropological study of those films' relationship to their respective eras, Ansen's essay is a fitfully fine effort you really can't help but envy.

--Noise, director Henry Bean's troubled, long-awaited follow-up to The Believer, finally touched down this week at the Rome Film Festival. The film stars Tim Robbins as a New Yorker whose noise fatigue compels madness, vandalism and other urban aggression. Clips I saw a while back didn't look promising, but Reuters' Silvia Aloisi reports it's "laugh-out-loud funny" and that critics are generally into it.

Posted at October 24, 2007 7:31 AM