Bradley Cooper isn’t interested in making a comedy, outright, with “Is This Thing On?” Instead, this is the third installment in what could be a trilogy about creativity, the way that art and performance can light a person up from the inside.
Tribune
“The Elephant,” streaming on HBO Max alongside a documentary on its creation, “Behind the Elephant,” is an animated take on exquisite corpse, the old surrealist game in which three artists contribute the head, torso or legs of a single figure, folding the paper so as not to see what the others had drawn.
James Cameron still makes movies like he’s got something to prove — despite his many accolades, awards and box-office successes.
The phrase “Time is a flat circle” often refers to how the manic post-pandemic news cycle makes comprehension of the recent past impossible. A similarly dazed bafflement is explored in W. David Marx’s lucid and entertaining — yet despairing — book about the new millennium’s flattening of culture, “Blank Space.”
Film fans like to lament, “they don’t make them like they used to,” specifically about the kinds of wry, life-affirming dramedies that director James L. Brooks perfected in the 1980s and ’90s. He doesn’t make them like he used to, either.
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