#12 — Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984) There are few movies that bring me as much immediate and consistent joy as Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, the brilliant concert film featuring Talking Heads. From the very beginning, with opening … Continue reading Top 50 Films of the 80s — Number Twelve
So I spent a good portion of this week feeling pretty ill. That’s ill in a lying in bed moaning all day way rather than a nineties fresh beats rap way. I don’t know that my condition compromised my writing at all this week, but let’s just say it’s a little more difficult to write a review of a deliberately languid, existentially fraught Russian mood piece under those circumstances. My other piece of film writing was for the latest entry in our Oeuvre series on Samuel Fuller. After writing on one of his touchstone war pictures, I got a chance … Continue reading Spectrum Check
#13 — Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) I first saw Do the Right Thing in the apartment of an upstairs neighbor when I was in college. We watched a rented VHS copy on a tiny little television–though a … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Thirteen
It felt like I had a far busier week with Spectrum than I actually did, but I know it’s because I was also scrambling to get ready for everything that needs to be written in the week ahead. In terms of what went up, my output was fairly modest. I had a new film review up, evaluating a documentary that managed to provide a breakneck recap of the evolution of the New York City club scene before segueing into a true crime story with unexpected doses of lurid elements. It’s one of those documentaries that can succeed by simply telling … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive was one of the true sensations of this year’s Cannes film festival. Though it may understandably seem otherwise, I don’t mean it as a knock when I note that I can completely understand that the contrast … Continue reading Who’s gonna tell you when it’s too late
#14 — The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985) I noted at the start of this traipse through a decade of movies that these are the films that were arguably most formative for me. These were the films that … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Fourteen
I never read Moneyball, the 2003 nonfiction bestseller by Michael Lewis that serves as the source material for Bennett Miller’s long-awaited follow-up to the wonderful Capote, but I didn’t come into the film entirely blind either. The film focuses on … Continue reading You can get tangled in a ball of rubber bands and twine
My posted work came entirely from the movie beat this week. I started with a French film that was a little wisp of of a thing. It may have sometimes felt like a foreign film softened into an American sitcom but it also featured Gérard Depardieu, who remains a marvelous actor, at least in his mother tongue, despite his recent unseemly exploits that made him the fodder for silly jokes. I also reviews a documentary about the Black Power Movement of the late-sixties and early-seventies. It had some basic structural flaws, but much of the footage was amazing. Angela Davis, … Continue reading Spectrum Check
The worst thing to emerge from the success of the 2009 movie The Hangover is the misconception that Todd Phillips makes good movies. Before that, the matter seemed to be fully settled, the opposite conclusion largely agreed upon across the … Continue reading The Unwatchables: Due Date
#15 — Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme, 1980) Part of the appeal of subscribing to auteur theory is the sense of extra connectedness to the directors with the strongest cinematic presence. It’s easy to feel like watching a film is akin to getting concerted insight into worldviews, spiritual philosophies and political preferences. The collected work becomes a backward version of a Rorschach test, with very specific material being transformed by the viewer into something nebulous enough to project suppositions onto. While I realize the inherent fallibility of such a view, I also can’t help but fall for it when it … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Fifteen
