#29 — Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) Roman Holiday comfortably coheres to many of the patterns that have dictated Hollywood-crafted romantic comedies for about as long as the moving pictures started to talk. There’s the upstanding man’s man, who may … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Nine
At some point, the meta magic of filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is going to wear so thin it can’t hold up a flimsy excuse for a movie concept, but the inevitable erosion hasn’t happened yet. Mere months after their astonishing and daring subversion of the corporate synergy movie model turned The Lego Movie into the most unlikely critical hit in ages (the film’s commercial success, while more impressive than expected, wasn’t exactly in doubt) they’ve returned with a sequel to 2012’s television show adaptation 21 Jump Street, itself a headlong dive into the rabbit hole of mocking self-awareness. … Continue reading Well can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine
#30 — Shane (George Stevens, 1953) No other film genre inspire hyperbolic statements about deconstructionist subversion like the western. That’s in part because the hefty log pile of westerns from the earliest decades of Hollywood are largely so staid and … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty
This might be a good place to acknowledge that I was dead wrong in my presumptive assessment of The Babe as one of the more interesting movies of the spring of 1992. The Player is great (that’s the film I was really pining for). Unfortunately, it took long enough to get to our town that it arrived on the same weekend as Batman Returns, which played to full houses while Robert Altman’s masterful film sold a couple tickets per showing. I don’t have much to add about the two films reviewed. Even in the capsules here, it’s clear I didn’t … Continue reading From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk
#31 — The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) The Night of the Hunter is famously the only film directed by esteemed character actor Charles Laughton. I’ve also seen it cited more than once as the finest film ever directed by someone whose main gig was on the other side of the camera. It’s absolutely one of the most striking and distinctive such efforts, especially for its time. In adapting the bestselling novel by Davis Grubb, first published in 1953, Laughton and his collaborators made a grim, expressionistic work, one that veered away from the growing trend towards tenderized … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-One
The X-Men #141, published with a cover date of January, 1981, contained a story entitled “Days of Future Past.” There was nothing on the front cover, iconic as it became, that indicated there was a momentous tale to be found … Continue reading The hourglass is draining fast, it knows no future, holds no past
Much as I’ve admired Kathryn Bigelow’s recent and somewhat sudden escalation to the upper ranks of “important” modern filmmakers–the two films responsible for the shift are both formidable works–I still struggle with the cognitive dissonance of the director of Point Break as an exalted Oscar-winner. That’s how much I disliked that film, an ire that’s only grown over the years as plenty of people have cited it as a willfully dumb pleasure. Despite what it might seem like, I can get behind grandly, deliberately dopey summer popcorn fare, old or new, but I’ve never understood the affection for this particular … Continue reading From the Archive: Point Break
Somewhere out there in the vast reaches of the unknown, there is a multiplex of the multiverse, playing all the great and near-great movies that never came to be within our humble reality. (I, for one, am prepared to buy … Continue reading He has the power to foresee or to look into the past, he is the ruler of the stars
#32 — Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950) When we screened Harvey in a “Writers and Their Movies” class I took in college, the professor introduced it by writing a quote on the blackboard. It was from one of her distant colleagues, … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Two
The Immigrant, the new film from director James Gray begins in 1921, as a woman and her sister are waiting in the anxiously hopeful misery of the line at Ellis Island. The supposed promised land is at the other end … Continue reading For peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing
Coffee for Two 