Since the new Conan flick is getting trashed from coast-to-coast, I half-expected Mick laSalle to do his contrarian (Conan-trarian?) thing and rave about it, but even he hated it. And I'll admit this is one of his funnier bits of writing in a while:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/18/DD7T1KOEIH.DTL
But lest you think Mick has somehow regained his sanity, check out the reviews for the new Anne Hathaway romance
One Day...
Salon.com: "an appallingly bad movie made by talented people who could and should have done much better, but somehow all drove off the cliff together"
Boston Globe: "miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie"
Rolling Stone: "This tear-jerking twaddle, adapted by David Nicholls from his 2009 bestseller, is nearly as bad as Anne Hathaway's British accent, which is heading for infamy." (BTW, Peter Travers goes out of his way to like almost everything)
ah, but then there's our Mick: "a beautiful movie, but beautiful in a way that life often is, not movies. Nothing is sudden or easy, either for the characters or for the audience, and there are no thunderbolts from the blue. Rather, the film achieves its effects and builds toward a wealth of feeling through an accumulation of seemingly day-to-day incidents, presented over the course of years. We meet two people, and with time and maturity, the towering consequence of their relationship reveals itself..."
