One of the things I like about The Fighter is the plainness of its title. The lack of adornment is nicely representative of the straightforwardness of its storytelling, the directness of its performances and the confident ease of the directing. … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2010 — Number Eight
A dead owl half-buried in snow and squalid apartments and scarily lifeless strip clubs and forbidden, secret love and a beach littered with corpses and smokestacks billowing poison into the sky and bipolar disorder and melted ice cream and a … Continue reading They think the future’s bright as halogen, we know it’s pretty bleak
Take any minute or two of Lesley Manville’s performance in Another Year and strip it of all context. Even in total isolation, it would be immediately recognizable as a character from a Mike Leigh film. She exhibits a haggardness so … Continue reading All this, but no surprises for this year’s girl
Despite the mad rush to anoint the film a staggering excavation of a generation transformed and defined by a different type of interconnectivity than any that’s come before–a charge seemingly led by film critics and others with only the most … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2010 — Number Nine
In an action that somehow felt like an overdue fulfillment of a marital obligation, I devoted a wall of words to extolling the virtues (if that’s the right word) of the willfully trashy, perhaps mildly satirical 1990 horror film Luther the Geek. Doing so meant a fresh viewing of the film, which means that I’ve now see it more often than many films that I truly love and consider great works of art. Of course, I’ve also seen Summer School more often than many films I truly love and consider great works of art so I shouldn’t complain. I also … Continue reading Spectrum Check
#46 — The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984) One of the unfortunate tendencies of filmmakers centering their art on foreign cultures or besieged minorities is a default towards protagonists who stand outside of the group being depicted, with a particular … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Forty-Six
In adapting Bryan Lee O’Malley’s series of graphic novels following the romantic exploits of Toronto layabout Scott Pilgrim, director Edgar Wright presumably had at least six different titles to choose from. Settling on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is perfectly … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2010 — Number Ten
I’m always a little sheepish when I begin the process of surveying the movie year just past. Given my physical placement in the world, I lack the ability to see all of the movies of any given calendar year before the December page is made obsolete at the moment when tradition dictates that Auld Lang Syne is sung. I don’t have the New York or Los Angeles luxury of the movies being rushed to my vicinity to qualify for year-end awards, nor do I have critic credentials sufficient to motivate studios to send me stacks upon stacks of screener copies. … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2010 — An Introduction
This simple way to describe Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is that its about both ends of a relationship: the beginning that’s full of promise and inspiration, and the ending that is like a crushing blow delivered over and over again. … Continue reading It’s the tattooed broken promise that I hide beneath my sleeve
It was another fairly busy week for me over at Spectrum Culture. I contribute my first offering to the Film Dunce feature, which invites writers to watch and consider seminal movies that had previously eluded them. I confessed to having neglected the debut feature from Mike Nichols, the film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Then I proceeded to rave about it to such a degree that it made it doubly embarrassing that I’d avoided it for so long. Then there are new movies, which led me to When We Leave, which was Germany’s official entry for … Continue reading Spectrum Check
