journal features

movie review - Royal Tanenbaums

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2002.01.18

This is a flick about a family that comes together after years of failure and heartbreak. It's a human tale, and has a delicious pace and feel to it. While it's a fairly straightforward story, the performances are just amazing (I think Bill Murray has found a second career in the kind of work he's done with these writers, and the role of the absentee father must have been written for Hackman).

The technique of gluing the story together with touches of narrative, flashbacks and 'chapter' summaries works very well. All in all, a great flick.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner