#22 — On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) It happens occasionally in this process: I come to one of those titles for which my enthusiasm for celebrating its merits without all that much concern for explicating the reasoning for its specific … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Two
Guardians of the Galaxy is the first film that’s convinced me Marvel Studios might be able to make a go of this moviemaking thing longterm. That might seem ridiculous given the fact that the offshoot of Marvel Comics has had an enviable box office run ever since they decided to take their characters in the own hands, beginning with Iron Man, released in 2008. Though the projects are costly, their lowest worldwide gross with a film was still over $250 million, and the bulk of them have handily crossed the half-billion mark. Artistically, though, they’ve floundered just enough to cast … Continue reading You said, it’s time to get your clothes on, you said, it’s time to leave the planet
When I decided I was going to share these old reviews, I committed to doing so with only the tiniest of alterations. No matter how strong the temptation to edit, I mentally pledged to refrain. Some Saturdays are harder than … Continue reading From the Archive: The Adventures of Huck Finn
#23 — The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952) There was a time when Hollywood was all klieg lights and high glamor, at least in its calculated depictions of self. It was lucrative to preserve the myth of happy creative miracles, dreams captured on celluloid for all to enjoy. By the nineteen-fifties, some cynicism was starting to creep in, and filmmakers allowed that their chosen business had a corrosion at its heart. Some of this was surely attributable to the general social shell shock felt in the post-war years, but I think there’s also the slide of Hollywood itself to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Three
In a cinematic irony that its subject would surely appreciate, the documentary Life Itself is dominated by the specter of death. Sure, the film does its duty in tracing the life of film critic Roger Ebert, who is arguably the … Continue reading The hills ringing hear the words in time, listen to the holler
As I’ve noted before, 2005 was the year that I took advantage of the bountiful blank page afforded me by the interweb and started writing movie reviews again. I tend to to think of it as a relatively slow development process, from noodling around to full-length reviews. But it seems I got to the destination a little more quickly than I remember, as this take on the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, written just a few months after I’d recommitted to writing about movies, has a hearty word count. There are two moments in the new Johnny Cash biopic … Continue reading From the Archive: Walk the Line
#24 — Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) Search “Touch of Evil” on Google, and the info box that pops up on the right side of the screen lists its release date as September 11, 1998, even as the synopsis … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Four
The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012). At the very core of The Impossible is the commonplace sin of depicting a real-life tragedy in an Asian land through the experience of well-to-do, white, European travelers. The devastating tsunami that struck countries on the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004 killed approximately a quarter of a million people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand, but its obviously rich vacationers played by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor whose story whose story needs to be told. This could be acceptable–albeit begrudgingly so–if the film still carried the sort of emotional weight that should … Continue reading Bayona, Lang, Moore, Sturges, Webb
We started our movie review radio program, The Reel Thing, in the fall of 1990, which meant that we had to contend with the still expanding market of home video. That was how a significant number of people did their movie viewing, and the home video release of a film could be as important of a story as its first sojourn through theaters. Besides, doing home video reviews helped us fill a few more minutes in an hour-long show. Now, I wish we’d more often used the opportunity of another review a few months later to find a way to … Continue reading From the Archive: Edward Scissorhands
When we arrived for a screening of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, my partner in all things requested two tickets to “Angry Monkeys.” It took the ticket seller a beat or two to catch on, but once he … Continue reading I reached the top and had to stop and that’s what bothering me
Coffee for Two 