The bottom line is this: I liked all of the performances and thought the best moments were the ones not getting much praise, it seems, from everyone else -- the serious, unironic, legitimately heartbreaking scenes. David Edelstein writes in his Igby review, "I squirmed, I laughed a lot," and describes the opening scene I referred to as a scene of "breathtaking—near mythic—tastelessness." Nothing about Igby made me squirm and none of the "tastelessness" seemed all that novel to me. Everyone seems to be enamored with Steers' "smart" writing, which I think is really just a way of saying they appreciate that Igby cleverly insults people with references that the average person doesn't get but most movie critics do. Hey, I like being part of the in-crowd just as much as the next guy, but the jokes were merely amusing to me and not laugh-out-loud funny -- like, for example, some of the dialogue in another movie with a Catcher in the Rye connection, The Good Girl (reviewed 8/27). Now there's a movie with some seriously hilarious dialogue that is funny because sometimes it's so tasteless you can't believe a character is actually saying it.
I haven't seen Moonlight Mile yet, a movie that also features Susan Sarandon along with The Good Girl's Jake Gyllenhaal and Dustin Hoffman. I loathe director Brad Silberling after he took Wim Wenders' masterpiece Wings of Desire and turned it into the awful City of Angels. But I'm intrigued enough to eventually see it because the critical response has been so mixed. Critics who like it really like it, and critics who hate it really hate it. Edelstein, for example, calls it the worst film of the year, while Ebert gives it 4 stars.
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