Email Author Robert Wilonsky

2003 Stories by Robert Wilonsky

• Heavy, Man

  published December 25, 2003

  It has become a subject of much discussion and debate amongst film fetishists in recent weeks: For which movie will Sean Penn win the Academy... More >>

• A Fan's Notes

  published December 11, 2003

  This being the end of the year, and since none of the people I wanted to write about this week felt it necessary to return any of my calls, from... More >>

• Comics From the Front

  published December 4, 2003

  Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe it struck you one morning as you stared in the mirror before trundling off to the job you hate, or maybe it hit... More >>

• Dance This Mess Around

  published December 4, 2003

  Honey is one of those movies you will see (or not, whatever), swear you've seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then... More >>

• Indian Giver

  published November 27, 2003

  In director Ron Howard's The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones' Samuel Jones takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre -- the... More >>

• Free Will

  published November 6, 2003

  Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren't seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a... More >>

• Tights Fit

  published November 6, 2003

  'Tis the season and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November you will find two films set during the final week of December,... More >>

• Give Thanks

  published November 6, 2003

  Pieces of April, made by playwright turned novelist turned screenwriter turned director Peter Hedges, could be confused for a compendium... More >>

• Big, Wet Kiss

  published November 6, 2003

  With its soundtrack stockpiled with songs of romance and Christmas and a screenplay by the man who wrote Bridget Jones's Diary, Four... More >>

• The Boss

  published October 23, 2003

  On October 12, BBC America aired the second-season premiere of The Office, the beloved mockumentary that follows paper-selling rats 'round... More >>

• All the Rage

  published October 16, 2003

  Dave, a man who's barely there, lulls his son to sleep with stories of a boy lost in the woods who escapes from wolves; it's a thrilling bedtime... More >>

• A Ball, Screwed

  published October 9, 2003

  It's beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are less the works of fiction than the products of documentary crews following around... More >>

• Half Great

  published October 9, 2003

  The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is "Quentin Tarantino's 4th film," when it's actually his 3.5th; it's too incomplete to be... More >>

• Time and Again

  published October 2, 2003

  Out of Time, in which we're to believe 48-year-old Denzel Washington and 32-year-old Sanaa Lathan were high school sweethearts, demands its... More >>

• It's a Black Thing

  published October 2, 2003

  D irector Richard Linklater's School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his... More >>

• The Reel Who

  published September 25, 2003

  The publicity materials sent in advance of the at-long-last release of The Kids Are Alright on DVD suggest that the maker of the 1979... More >>

• Lowbrow, Meet Eyebrow

  published September 25, 2003

  The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell... More >>

• Grumpy Old Men

  published September 18, 2003

  Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and... More >>

• Dead All Over

  published September 18, 2003

  Never mind the trailers, which advertise Cold Creek Manor as some kind of horror-thriller, complete with the image of a hand emerging from... More >>

• Con Heir

  published September 11, 2003

  When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen -- a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in... More >>

• Sucks, Dickie

  published September 4, 2003

  The 1990-'95 run of Saturday Night Live, when the show was a playground populated by the likes of Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Dana Carvey,... More >>

• See Dick, and Tom, Run

  published August 28, 2003

  A respected comedy writer sits over lunch with a man who, in the late 1960s, was very, very famous. This man, slender and balding, was a comedian... More >>

• Stupor Man

  published August 28, 2003

  Harvey Pekar, star of a long-running comic-book series he writes and others illustrate, is reminded early in American Splendor that he's no... More >>

• American Idyll

  published August 21, 2003

  The praising of Hollywood summertime cinema is the pastime of pale critics who, come late July, start to wonder what the strange yellow orb is... More >>

• For Love of the Game

  published August 14, 2003

  He knows there are people, too many, who do not like him. He has to know. They've told him to his face--the studio executives who slice and... More >>