Recently I saw an interview with Michelle Pfeiffer on a morning talk show, the sort of place where informed discourse goes to die. Amidst the general harmless banter that Pfeiffer was clearly tolerating rather than enjoying, there came a point … Continue reading Maybe someday I’ll share your little distant cloud
I definitely appreciate that Duncan Jones is trying to create a science fiction film that’s as much about ideas as it is about C.G.I. logistics with his feature directorial debut, Moon. Set in an indeterminate future era in which our … Continue reading Though I’d like to look down at the earth from above, I would miss all the places and people I love
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971). There are many who consider this film to be the quintessential Altman effort, and it’s not hard to see why. The hallmarks of Altman’s legend are all there: the overlapping dialogue, the moral ambivalence, the richly-conceived characters. Most importantly and impressively, the film is a thrilling example of the ways in which Altman pulls all these elements of his craft together to give the sense of a fully developed culture and society. The film is focused on the main characters, but the entire frame ripples with life. You feel as if you know … Continue reading And our silver screen affair, it weighs less to me than air
Had I gone into Away We Go uneducated about the filmmakers behind it, I would have been startled when the directing credit popped up at the end. This loose, scruffy travelogue sends a thirtysomething couple expecting their first child bounding … Continue reading Going round in circles, here we go again
Trouble the Water (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, 2008). It would be easy to make a documentary about the devastation Hurricane Katrina brought to New Orleans and the equally disastrous governmental response that is grounded in apoplectic anger, especially since indignation seems to be the default starting point for many current non-fiction filmmakers. Deal and Lessin create something more delicate, more nuanced, more complicated, and, because of these qualities, far more fascinating. The hook of the film’s first half is on-the-scene camcorder footage taken by Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Rivers Roberts as her neighborhood and then her home floods during … Continue reading Oh the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on
When making a movie about major cons, it helps to have Ricky Jay‘s involvement, which bestows upon the project a tacit endorsement. And so The Brothers Bloom begins with Jay’s voice, narrating the headlong tale of the titular characters’ boyhood … Continue reading We question everything we see, when someone’s talking there’s nothing to believe
It doesn’t seem that long since Sam Raimi directed a horror movie, but it has been, going back to Evil Dead 2 in 1987 (that film’s follow-up, Army of Darkness, is a lot of things–comedy, action film, warped gladiator movie–but … Continue reading But they don’t know there can be no show
It’s nearly fifteen years since Pixar, the little studio behind a small batch of acclaimed and Oscar-winning computer animated shorts, released the revolutionary Toy Story. It was actually viewed as somewhat risky at the time. The long, expensive process required … Continue reading And she’s learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say
In 1984, a fledgling filmmaker with one feature to his name, an inauspicious low-budget horror sequel, imparted to the world a humble little story a young woman, the time traveler who loved her, and the big, oddly accented robot who … Continue reading Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies and everyone goes
If it’s still true that familiarity breeds contempt, then there must be a lot of contemptuous people buying movie tickets these days. While I still subscribe to Manohla Dargis’s assertion, made in defense of a movie I find mediocre at … Continue reading We travel everywhere, we’re gonna take the suburbs to the stars
Coffee for Two 