David Edelstein on Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder:

There are critics who’ve greeted Malick’s last few cinematic church services on their knees, and I went into this one with my mind open. But at some point a wind from On High blew it shut. It’s not that the characters’ struggles don’t interest me. You share those struggles, no matter what your faith or lack thereof, if you’re human. The problem is these characters don’t seem human. They’re not people, they’re symbols of people, so the whole thing comes off as generalized, even woozy.

Ben Affleck tells Terry Gross about doing the research for Argo, which is nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay at this weekend’s Academy Awards:

The earliest memory I have of … world events is President Reagan’s assassination attempt, which was 1982. So this was sort of history in the same way [that] doing a movie about the Revolutionary War would have been history for me. I had to start from scratch.

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers

Coming up on Fresh Air Weekend, Golden Globe-winning director Ben Affleck talks about his Golden Globe-winning film Argo and Dustin Hoffman talks about directing for the first time with Quartet, and about how he is an unattractive man but would have been had he been born a woman.

Affleck also talks about his fondness for doing impressions. And he does a mean Al Pacino as the clip above demonstrates.

Thank you, Kerry Lauerman.

Salon:

Terry Gross’ interview with Ben Affleck on Tuesday’s “Fresh Air” is a uniformly interesting discussion about the making of Affleck’s “Argo,” and the effort and ethics that go into bringing quasi-historical depictions to the big screen. But it becomes particularly interesting about halfway in, when Gross asks Affleck about his approach to handling history in a motion picture. He admits to taking creative license with the movie

In case you missed it, here’s a link to yesterday’s interview with Ben Affleck, including the whole discussion of how Hollywood handles history.

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers

Ben Affleck on his fondness for impressions:

“I like to do impressions. … I feel a little bashful of it because I know it’s not really acting. Like, once you get into mimicry and impressions, it is a gift and a gift that I love to watch. The guy on SNL who can do Denzel, to me, it’s just amazing, but I try not to rely too much on it because I know that it’s sort of like, I used to play chess a lot with my brother and Matt [Damon] when we all lived together, and then we got into speed chess, and all the teachers will say, ‘You can’t play speed chess. It will ruin your game.’ And I think there’s something about impressions a little bit that will ruin your game, because it’s just like the fast, Chinese-food-accessible version of a character.”

Image of Affleck in Argo courtesy of Warner Brothers