Pictureland

Love, Michael Haneke style.  The title of the Austrian director's tenth feature film is as perverse as it is profoundly appropriate.  In Amour we see abundant example of love at it's most compassionate, at its most brave, at its most...loving.  But we also see amour played out in one of the most grinding, heartbreaking ways imaginable.  That really is love, some might say.  That's life.  It is, at least, the only sort of love story that Michael Haneke would seem able or willing to tell. There's little surprise in Amour where all of this is going.  No more than where any of our lives are ultimately bound.  After a silent interval of crisp, white opening credits against a black background - no surprise there, either, from Mr. Haneke - the silence is broken by the crashing open of a Parisian apartment's entry doors.  Before we see what is waiting in the sealed bedroom of the apartment, the covering of noses by a few of the attending pol...

Young Megan Charpentier, after her first look at the script for Andres Muschietti's   Mama. Mama mia!  Is there no end to the suffering that will result from bank deregulation?  How many lives have been affected for the worse?  How many national economies thrown into chaos?  How many men  driven to shoot financial firm partners, do the same to their estranged wives, drag their confused children on strange odysseys that culminate in gangly shape-shifting 19th-century ghosts wringing their sorry necks before playing mother to those increasingly feral children for five years, the poor waifs subsisting on a diet mainly of cherries?  How many?!!   Well, as for that last scenario, I feel safe in proclaiming the answer to be an unambiguous one, and that courtesy of the operatically silly Mama from writer and director Andres Muschietti. Most of the above takes place before the opening titles arrive in Mama.  Then it's five years hence from the...