The Great Buck Howard = not so great

Have you heard of this movie? One of Malkovich’s recent low-budget choices that seem not to get much pre-video-release attention despite his always great performances therein. This one stars Tom Hanks’s son as a guy who decides for no clear reason (he was unhappy; I guess it’s enough) to leave law school and get a job as a road manager for a washed-up mentalist.

buckhoward

Buck Howard is a great character. Malkovich gives him a shoulder-joint-busting handshake that’s funny every time. And so the movie should be great but it’s not even that good. I couldn’t figure out what was keeping me from falling in love with it until the end. All throughout the movie, Colin Hanks’s character has been letting us know not just what’s going on, but what his character thinks about what’s going on through a cinematic technique I want to spend the rest of this blog post um, interrogating: the voice-over.

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