Eleven years after seeing The Hurt Locker for the first and only time, the scene that’s most ingrained in my memory has nothing to do with IEDs in a godforsaken desert. It’s Jeremy Renner back home, lost in the supermarket, stymied by a wall of cereal. Describing a kind of domestic impotence, it remains the quintessential poetic image of war’s addictive pull. The battlefield … [Read more...]
‘Aardvark’ too sluggish to make much of psychological premise
Why do screenwriters hate therapists so much? In most cases, accuracy and verisimilitude are important to a film’s pedigree, but that’s rarely the case when dealing with licensed mental health counselors. Psychologists in popular entertainment rarely resemble anything like their real-life counterparts — morally, legally, temperamentally. They’re either silent, judgmental … [Read more...]