Here’s the sad truth about the set of actors who comprised last year’s set of Oscar nominees, stirring the Oscars So White hashtag lament: it was less a reflection of Academy voters’ collective prejudice and more an ailment brought on … Continue reading Well, La La-Di-Da: Reflections on the Oscar Nominations
20th Century Women, the third feature from director Mike Mills, raids his own history in compelling fashion. He has employed this creative tactic before. Though Mills earned some praise for his debut, Thumbsucker, it was his sophomore effort, Beginners, that stirred more effusive plaudits on the way to securing an Academy Award for Christopher Plummer. The latter effort was heavily autobiographical, drawn from Mills’s experience with a father who came out of the closet late in life. 20th Century Women turns its attention to the other figure that looms above Mills on the family tree. Set in 1979, the film follows Jamie (Lucas … Continue reading Now Playing: 20th Century Women
Because today I want to this space to feature a film directed by a bad-ass woman. This was written for our weekly movie review radio show in the fall of 1991, which was a helluva year for Jodie Foster. Thankfully, she was duly awarded for her accomplishments. It’s pretty easy to figure out what attracted Jodie Foster to Scott Frank’s screenplay Little Man Tate, the story of a youngster with pronounced talent who’s showered with attention because of that gift, and who has a deep, special bond with mother. It sounds remarkably like the story of Little Woman Foster, the … Continue reading From the Archive: Little Man Tate
Though I’m going to go ahead and follow my usual practice of typing out a bunch of words, I think the ideal way to evaluate the new film Elle is with an artfully constructed infographic. This helpful guide would take individual moments from the film and measure whether their inner being is guided more by the aura of French cinema or by the ruddy instincts of director Paul Verhoeven. The scene in which a woman confronts the new, young lover of her ex-husband and the two of them conclude that, with the tension of an initial encounter out of the … Continue reading Now Playing: Elle
I haven’t done the math, but I’d confidently wager that there’s no other director about whom I’ve written more often and more enthusiastically than Martin Scorsese. The movie review radio program I co-hosted and co-produced debuted in the fall of … Continue reading From the Archive: The Departed
Hidden Figures is just good enough that I wish it were better. The film, fictionalized from Margot Lee Shetterly’s recently released history book of the same name, digs into the sadly under-shared story of the African-American women who were centrally involved in the monumentally difficulty scientific and mathematic work that drove the U.S. space program in the nineteen-sixties. In a way, it’s satisfying that the film is stodgily constructed and strangely facile in its examination of how the obvious talents of these women needed to scramble around the confining, casually bigoted norms of the era. In the field of Hollywood … Continue reading Now Playing: Hidden Figures
No (Pablo Larraín, 2012). In Chile in the late nineteen-eighties, the dictatorial government of General Augusto Pinochet orchestrated a public vote to give the populace a chance to weigh in on whether or not they’d maintain control for another eight years after a decade-and-a-half of bludgeoning rule. With various systems under tight control and the people largely cowed by governmental forces, it was expected to be a mere formality on the way to maintaining continuity, a show of phony democracy to appease the international community. Instead, Pinochet was ousted. In this consideration by screenwriter Pedro Peirano and director Pablo Larraín, the … Continue reading Larraín, Lubitsch, Riley, Snyder, Sollett
I’m among those who try to avoid the term “guilty pleasure,” but there are times when it absolutely applies. This observation brings us straight to The Temp, one of the rare movies of my college radio reviewing tenure that I reported my viewpoint with a degree of sheepishness. But I also stand by this review. It’s been ages since I’ve seen it, but I know I had a blast watching this every time I stumbled upon a cable TV showing. Director Tom Holland has always approached his horror films with a certain cheekiness. Fright Night was a terrific vampire film … Continue reading From the Archive: The Temp
“I once wrote this short story called ‘The Best Blues Singer in the World,’ and it went like this —’The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.’ End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I’ve been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.” That quote is drawn from a Paris Review interview with August Wilson, published in 1999. As Wilson suggests, the single sentence short story does a better job than any plot recap ever could of describing what’s happening in … Continue reading Now Playing: Fences
The Gift (Joel Edgerton, 2015). I find it amusing and even endearing that Joel Edgerton bypassed any potential inclinations to establish himself as a serious cinematic artist with his feature directorial debut and instead crafted a lurid little thriller not unlike those that routinely slunk into cineplexes throughout the nineteen-nineties. In The Gift, Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall) move to Southern California because the former has taken a new job. While shopping for their new home, Simon and Rebecca bump into Gordo (Edgerton), an acquaintance from Simon’s high school days. Gordo insinuates himself into their lives — including … Continue reading Edgerton, Holmer, Kriegman and Steinberg, Moore, Øvredal
Coffee for Two 