It is not a love story. Well, in a way it is, and it certainly has all of the trappings of one. An Education follows a schoolgirl named Jenny in nineteen-sixties London who encounters a charming older man, and begins … Continue reading Do you see her face when she’s gone, sometimes so bright your heart just stops
#13 — Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) It is perhaps a marker of the diminished expectations of any film that is dominated and driven by action sequences that Ang Lee’s involvement in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon initially seemed perplexing. Lee had made his mark with films that were about conversations rather than fisticuffs, films that were deeply invested in character. Even the battle sequences and other violent skirmishes in the film he’d made immediately prior, the flawed but underrated Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, were entirely secondary to small focused scenes that examined how the characters … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Thirteen
So this is what Jewish fatalism looks like stretched out to feature length. The new film from Ethan and Joel Coen, A Serious Man, focuses on a college professor at the dawn of the nineteen-seventies, facing a tenure hearing and … Continue reading Here it comes, here it comes, here comes the serious bit
#14 — Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) It is a love story, like a thousand movies than came before, and a thousand that will follow. It adheres to that most familiar of trajectories: two people meet, gradually fall into in one another’s arms, and face impediments to being together. There are two potential paths to the closing credits, one ending in bliss, the other in tragedy. Despite the familiarity, Brokeback Mountain is uniquely special. It’s not just that this romance is between two men, cowboys drawn to each other while charged with looking over a herd of sheep together on … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Fourteen
In this weekly space, I write a lot about music I procured fifteen or twenty years ago. Back then I was getting albums on vinyl, on CD, and, if desperate, on cassette. While it was no harder to find the newest U2 or R.E.M. record than it was to find Milli Vanilli or Aerosmith, a significant amount of the music that captured my interest required some hunting to get a copy (or sometimes pleading with whatever small label originally serviced the radio station with a second copy that could be added to a poor radio station staffer’s collection). Often the … Continue reading One for Friday: Ed Haynes, “Splash”
#15 — American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) The past decade was a good time for deconstructed narrative in film. Beginning with the mad flush of creativity of the cinematic year 1999, when the likes of Being … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Fifteen
Even though something else has been the Interweb musical flavor of the moment the past couple of days (and I have a well-established weakness for the creatures that populate said clip), I like a different viral video even more. (Due credit to Radio Exile, that’s where I found it.) Continue reading Okay, here’s the situation
#16 — Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003) There’s a pleasing irony at the heart of Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass. In making a film based on real events, Ray has a certain amount of leeway to embellish and rearrange, shifting the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Sixteen
“There is no way to describe the way she walked except as a kind of brave sensual trudging: as if she were nose-deep in snowdrifts, and yet on route to meet a lover. She came up the dead center of the mall, her gray coat fluttering a little in a breeze off the Jersey coast. Her high heels hit precise and neat each time on the X’s of the grating in the middle of the mall. Half a year in the city and at least she had learned to do that. Had lost heels, and once in a while composure, … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
#17 — Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001) Of course, there’s no shortage of admirable traits in Robert Altman’s finest films, but one of the clearest is the way they are rooted in the eras in which they were made. M*A*S*H … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Seventeen
