As I’m getting this in just under the wire for it to still officially be a Saturday post, it should be clear that I’m still highly distracted by a bevy of other responsibilities, compromising my ability to transcribe some old … Continue reading From the Archive: Ocean’s Thirteen
#36 — Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Surges, 1944) It was Sandy Sturges, the wife of Preston Sturges, who offered the ideal summation of the writer-director’s approach to tugging his own brand of creativity through the many graters of oversight required during his time in Hollywood. She offered, “What Preston said he did was: ‘Obey strictly the letter of the law…and totally ignore the spirit.’” Sturges had plenty of overseers whose strictures he chose to evade. Not only was he confined by the so-called Hays Code and the constantly voiced dismay of his studio bosses (after leaving Paramount Pictures, Sturges maintained, … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Six
Three years ago, tossed the keys to the most important vehicle for the successful but still relatively new Marvel Studios, the film that would offer the culmination of a lot of careful positioning through a practically unprecedented convergence of cinematic properties, writer-director Joss Whedon went ahead and bravely made a Joss Whedon movie, drawing on his ample skill set honed through a bevy of geek-friendly properties, many of them interconnected. He was fulfilling the Marvel corporate vision, but doing so with a film that popped with his own sensibilities. The rhythms, dynamics, and dialogue were thrillingly familiar to anyone who once spent … Continue reading Golden living dreams of visions
To help prove that I dutifully transcribe these old reviews regardless of the temptation to give the decades-old language a sprucing up, just look at the garbled syntax below. Some of these sentences gave me pangs of pain as I retyped them. Then again, those buzzes of internal agony could be attributed to memories of the many movies cited in the first paragraph slithering out from behind whatever suppression devices my brain has kindly deployed to this point. This is from the November 26, 1990 episode of The Reel Thing. We’d only be doing the show for about three months, and … Continue reading From the Archive: Predator 2
#37 — Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) Lots of films have indelible images, those visual moments that don’t just endure in the memory but are so closely, solidly associated with a single work of art that any approximation that follows, no matter how tangential of glancing, automatically stirs comparison. There is no way, for example, for a horror film director to set a smart, evocative scene at an indoor swimming pool without calling to mind Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, at least for a certain breed of film fan. (Those who think the horror genre started with Friday the 13th likely escape this … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Seven
Focus (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2015). There are a whole lot of film folks trying to pivot their careers with this strangely aspirational con job drama. Star Will Smith is clearly trying to put After Earth completely behind him by staking a claim on the territory of smart movies for adults that George Clooney has made his whole grain bread and artisan butter. At the same time, filmmaking partners Ficarra and Requa endeavor to demonstrate they can do more than comedies with a slightly twisty edge. Everyone fails in their attempt to stretch. The film is notably tepid, even as … Continue reading Edwards, Ficarra and Requa, Levy, Stoller, Wyatt
I don’t feel obligated to sync this backward-looking weekly post to some current media offering, but this weekend seems to call for it. Much as I was a Joss Whedon disciple, I wouldn’t have tagged him at the likely future impresario of the biggest blockbuster franchise going, but then I also wouldn’t have imagined that my boyhood comic book collection would provide such lucrative fodder for moviemaking. If the Make Mine Marvel aesthetic is going to be the defining quality of the current cinematic age, then Whedon is an excellent choice to be a primary creative force behind it. His television … Continue reading From the Archive: Serenity
#38 — Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) Rebecca holds a unique place in Oscar lore as the sole Alfred Hitchcock film to nab the Best Picture trophy (or Outstanding Production, as it was still called at the time). The famously unrewarded filmmaker lost out to John Ford (for The Grapes of Wrath) the second of four Best Director awards Ford collected in his career. Of course, naming Rebecca Best Picture without similarly honoring Hitchcock is patently absurd, given the director’s always distinctive stamp characterized by a nearly unparalleled skill at the interlocking of the mechanics of narrative with a striking visual sense (to be … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Eight
#39 — Without Love (Harold S. Bucquet, 1945) Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made nine films together. It is without a doubt one of the great screen partnerships in American film history, practically defining what that elusive quality chemistry looks like for every generation to follow. Of course, there was an off-screen pairing between the two of them, officially secret but widely known, that added turbo to the fuel, but the real life twinkle of romance does explain everything. It’s entirely possible that the splendid contrasts of their acting styles — she strident, he relaxed, she crisply intelligent, he scruffily … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Nine
Not much to add here, mostly because I’m too exhausted to do so. Just an old review, plucked at near random from my former online home. I don’t want to get into a writing rut with comedy films featuring former … Continue reading From the Archive: Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Coffee for Two 