| Critic |
Review |
Quote |
Analysis |
This Week's Verdict |
A.O. Scott,
The New York Times |
Shrek The Third |
"Unless the Shrek team wants to follow its hero into the dangerous swamps of mid-life, thus shifting his literary pedigree away from William Steig and in the direction of John Updike or Philip Roth, it may want to leave him in a condition of more-or-less happily ever after."
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Please let this be the end of the Shrek franchise. Though A.O. Scott seems to be strangely drawn to the idea of further Shrek adventures, the suburbia of Roth and Updike does not need more denizens. Especially not animated green ones.
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J. Hoberman,
Village Voice |
The Wendell Baker Story |
"The Wendell Baker Story thus turns into a version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with the Wilson brothers squeezing maximum humor out of mistreatment of the resident oldsters — notably '70s icons Seymour Cassel and Harry Dean Stanton, who give the movie a welcome zetz. Not so the eternally righteous Kris Kristofferson, who embodies a petrified counterculture fantasy as the institution's in-house stone mystic. The tone is so Watergate that Will Ferrell's energetic unbilled turn as Wendell's romantic nemesis seems positively futuristic." |
The Wilson brothers (three of them this time) try to revive the left-of-center '70s movie and don't quite go the distance. Also, try as you may, it is hard to hate Will Ferrell.
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Eric Kohn,
The New York Press |
The Herzog (Non) Fiction Retrospective at Film Forum |
"'Documentaries today are dated,' Herzog explains. 'I compare it to a medieval knight who would go to battle for centuries, and all of a sudden gets confronted with cannons and firearms. We have to ask questions about reality in a different way. We have to answer. I've been one of those who has come up with answers.'" |
Krikey! Werner Herzog retrospectives; medieval knights; Will Ferrell and the Wilson brothers in search of lost times; references to Updike and Roth. It looks like dude week in reviewville. Then again maybe every week is dude week over here.
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Stephanie Zacharek,
Salon.com |
Shrek The Third |
"But maybe there's a difference between recontextualization and uncontextualization. [. . .] Of course, we can't expect a movie like Shrek the Third to parse the meaning or significance of a great song. But when it attempts to reduce a great song to a hollow backing track for the sound of movie patrons' filing out of the theater, trampling popcorn boxes and soda cups along the way, we don't have to dig it. We can, and we should, just say nay." |
Thankfully Salon's Stephanie Zacharek can be counted on to stand up against the callous machinations of Hollywood profit-mongering and make your cultural studies minor from college feel worthwhile.
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Stephen Hunter,
The Washington Post |
Shrek The Third |
"Shrek the Third manages to be something of a paradox: It contains two theoretically self-canceling polarities. It's (a) quite funny and (b) quite bad. Hmm, possibly that's actually harder to pull off than to make a movie that's (a) funny and (b) good, or (a) unfunny and (b) bad. But the end result is that you laugh a lot and you go home grumpy." |
Is Stephen Hunter a little bit irritated with himself for being amused by an animated movie of questionable quality?
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