Salon.com > Fish Tank

Michael Fassbender, future superstar

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:01:00 +0000

If Michael Fassbender's rapid career ascent doesn't lead to a long career as a movie star, he definitely won't have the media to blame. The 32-year-old Irish-German actor, probably best known to general moviegoers (at least until now) for playing Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino's World War II pastiche "Inglourious Basterds," is pretty much a journalist's dream. He's charismatic and handsome -- having placed very high on Salon's 2010 Men on Top list -- but also friendly and unassuming. He's a professed movie buff, who acts completely delighted to be hanging out with me in a New York hotel suite on a chilly afternoon, doing goofball Orson Welles impressions and dissecting the upside-down gender politics in American director Cary Joji Fukunaga's new film of "Jane Eyre," in which Fassbender plays the haunted leading man, Mr. Rochester.

Is “Grown Ups” really 2010′s worst film?

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:15:00 +0000

Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir recently put the finishing touches on his year-end, first-ever, all-encompassing movie ranking list. Salon's editor in chief Kerry Lauerman wanted to challenge him on his rationale. Their IM exchange is reproduced below:

Lauerman: Let's do this!

O'Hehir: Sure.

Lauerman: Actually, that's the sort of enthusiastically clichéd line that might appear in "Grown Ups"! I must ask -- with your year of moviegoing over and your full ranking of everything you've seen completed -- do you really, really think "Grown Ups" was the worst movie you saw in all of 2010?

O'Hehir: Ha! Well, "worst" is always a tough thing to define. I think it appalled me more than anything else I saw all year, in that talented people were involved, and in some sense the intentions could be called good -- by all accounts, Adam Sandler is a great guy -- and the results were teeth-grindingly juvenile and stupid.

“Fish Tank”: Forbidden sex, teenage wasteland

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:20:00 +0000

Here's what interests the supremely talented British director Andrea Arnold: ordinary people's lives, poised between transformation and despair; the dire landscapes of sub-middle-class contemporary existence; dirty, dangerous and exceptionally hot sex. Given all that, it might seem surprising that Arnold has virtually no profile in the United States: Her debut feature, the terrific Glasgow-set erotic thriller "Red Road," came and went briskly in 2007, and her new "Fish Tank," which may be even better and has piled up various British and European awards, is likely to go almost unnoticed amid the blizzard of imports on the IFC Films slate.