Black Swan is a big, raging swarm of a movie. It’s either a horror film with art house pretensions or an art house movie enamored of the grandiose luridness that can be borrowed from the horror genre. It rains the … Continue reading She waves a magic wand and then she settles on me
What can I say? It’s a busy week at Spectrum Culture, so I will once again direct you elsewhere. Continue reading In the middle of the winter, in the middle of a wood
Today, I will once again direct you elsewhere. Continue reading I didn’t know what a brute I was
I definitely think the Hollywood Foreign Press Association got one of the Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama nominees right today. To see more of my thoughts on that particular performance, I must direct you … Continue reading Except in parts when the moral kicks in
#3 — Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) Before he was a brand, Quention Tarantino was just a filmmaker, and when Pulp Fiction arrived in 1994 he still had the capacity to surprise. It was only his second movie, after all. … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Three
#4 — Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) In Empire magazine a couple of years ago, Francis Ford Coppola condescendingly asked Steven Spielberg (buffered by the safe distance afforded by an interlocutor) if he was going to ever make a “personal” … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Four
To check my current facility with sentence structure and grammar and junk like that today, you’ll need to look elsewhere. Continue reading Them gasoline boys downtown sure talk gritty
Danny Boyle makes the worst movies that I kinda like. 127 Hours is drawn from the actual experience of Aron Ralston, an outdoors enthusiast who gained fame in 2003 when a solo excursion to Utah’s Bluejohn Canyon went awry, leaving … Continue reading When all the fires are fanned, when we’re shucking our plans, when we’re too weak to stand on our two feet
Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009). I fully expected that Ritchie’s first real stab at crafting a blockbuster entertainment would be an over-directed mess. Instead, it’s fairly drab, a generic exercise in filling the screen with bigger, louder, grander nonsense at every turn. Of course, it’s still a mess, a clumsy attempt at making the most famous detective in literary history relevant for a modern audience that’s more interested in quipping tomfoolery than feats of logic. Robert Downey, Jr. plays the title role with the sort of chomping fussiness that’s too often the defining characteristic of his acting, and Jude Law … Continue reading Eastwood, Kusama, Ritchie, Roeg, Vallée
