This is clearly not my week to be pleased with the movie-making universe: Seriously, first off, this movie is based on the dumbest, ugliest pick-up ploy of all time. How many women in the world get turned on by married schlubs (in a universe where they don’t recognize said married schlub as Adam Sandler)? How can a woman who is as theoretically great as Brooklyn Decker’s character is... 

As I imagine many of you can tell, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how to construct narrative, story and character over the last three or four months. So I quite enjoyed this essay by Chris Braak that io9 republished over the weekend on how to understand evil characters, and providing a taxonomy of kinds of evil and how they affect the appropriate responses in the fiction in which... 

I’d never actually read Sense and Sensibility until this weekend, but I’m glad I did. Its social satire isn’t as sharply hilarious as Pride and Prejudice‘s or Emma‘s, perhaps because the rich people involved aren’t simply behaving badly, they’re doing bad things that have material consequences, whether it’s forcing people out of their homes or into... 

Long-time readers will know that I find Leonardo DiCaprio considerably ponderous. That said, I would totally buy him as Jay Gatsby. The character is completely humorless but that’s because his perspective is so limited, and his focus so intensely directed, that he lacks self-awareness or a capacity for irony or even funny bitterness. DiCaprio’s also grown into the kind of rough physicality... 

Perhaps because I’ve been finding myself feeling more like an actual grownup than I usually do, I’ve been more highly aware than usual of shows and movies that do a good job of showing adults making difficult choices. Y’all know I’m quite fond of Covert Affairs, but I thought the show did an especially nice job in the finale when one character was given the opportunity... 

Stephen Holden, in his review of Heartbreaker, a French movie with Dirty Dancing as a touchstone and plot point, complains that “the disconnect between Juliette’s [the main character, who likes Dirty Dancing] aristocratic airs and her prosaic tastes taints your fantasy that she is something special.” To which I say, the hell with all that. Dirty Dancing has many virtues.... 

So, I watched Legally Blonde 2 again over the weekend. It’s not a good movie. The jokes are sillier, the sorority set-up is less counterintuitive and smartly funny, Paulette is a one-off rather than an actual character who deserves fulfillment and who is a means for Elle to think about other people. But it does have the virtue of being a movie about a woman whose fiancee compromises for... 

I feel like The Next Three Days would be a much more interesting movie if a) Elizabeth Banks’ character was guilty of the murder for which she’d been incarcerated or b) she was breaking Russell Crowe’s innocent character out of jail: This just feels like a variation on a damsel in distress story, otherwise. And not a very interesting one at that, particularly since Crowe’s... 

I cannot think of a movie that’s looked less appealing than this, based on a trailer, at least, in a very, very long time: There is no rationale here. Who the hell is Zach Galifanakis? Who the hell is Robert Downey Jr.’s character? What about Jamie Foxx? Why are they roadtripping together? Especially if they’re trying to get somewhere for the birth of Downey Jr.’s... 

You know how I mentioned a couple of months back that Angelina Jolie was in talks to do a live-action Maleficent movie with Tim Burton? Apparently it’s the movie on her plate that she’s most excited about, and she’s like the character since she was young herself. All of which makes me extremely happy. A vast flood of speculation and rumor and nonsense has been written about Jolie’s...