How Alvy Became Harry.

“The decade that followed had been a weird one for the rom-com, which seemed to retreat from Annie Hall’s not-awful sexual politics all the way back to The Taming of the Shrew. In the 1980s, when a blonde woman and a not-blond man were onscreen together, the idea was usually that the woman needed some serious thawing out (as in TV’s Moonlighting and L.A. Law)…the genre needed a game-changer, and romantically and culturally, When Harry Met Sally… was it. If you want to know how we got from Annie Hall to Knocked Up, there’s only one route, and it’s through this movie.”

On the film’s 25th anniversary, Mark Harris revisits When Harry Met Sally… for Grantland. “It’s not Annie Hall, but a movie about people who have seen Annie Hall.”

Shudder Island.


If Gatsby didn’t satisfy your hankering for Leo di Caprio amid the playgrounds of the idle rich, the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is now online, also with Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin, Jon Bernthal, Kyle Chandler, Spike Jonze, Shea Whigham, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau, and the inimitable Joanna Lumley.

I dunno…I know it’s Scorsese and all that, but at least Gatsby had period panache going for it. This looks like yet another generic Rise and Fall of the Financial Sector Douchebros, and Boiler Room, Margin Call and the Wall Streets, among other films, already covered these useless yahoos enough to my satisfaction. We’ll see.