We had a long holiday weekend and a pronounced need to purge our overloaded DVR with some of the uglier offerings taking up space. Under those circumstances, our household holds the belief that there’s one clear avenue to follow. We … Continue reading Bad Movie Night — The Sorcerer’s Apprentice/Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947). Based on Frederic Wakeman’s novel from the previous year, The Hucksters burrows into the intersection between advertising and media as a sharp-witted, upstanding man returns to the former field after years away. Clark Gable plays Victor Norman, a crafty operator who views his soap company overlord largely with sardonic superiority. The portions of the film that survey the ever-shifting terrain of the radio environment are uniformly strong, thanks in no small part to the boisterously effective performance of Sydney Greenstreet as the corporate bigwig who sets everyone but Gable’s Norman aquiver. The stretches that deal … Continue reading Conway, Garbus, von Sternberg, Weir, Yates
Louis C.K.: Hilarious (Louis C.K., 2010). It’s probably too much to ask that a stand-up comedy concert film reach the artistic peaks of the only example of the form that can reasonably by called cinematic art. There are limitations built right into filming a comedian on stage and too much effort to compensate for them just leads to undue fuss. Better then to be as unadorned as possible and count on the material to make the endeavor worthwhile. C.K. brings the same dedicated understatement to his directing work that shapes his darkly brilliant FX series. Luckily, C.K. is near the … Continue reading C.K., Gluck, Hitchcock, Yates
Best Foot Forward (Edward Buzzell, 1943). Less than a decade before a certain TV series elevated Lucille Ball to the stratosphere of stardom, she was merely the “Queen of the Bs,” which makes it a little odd to see her playing herself in this film about a cadet at a military academy who convinces the redhead to come be his date for a big dance. She’s also far removed from the ditzy whirligig persona that she’d soon be known for, playing scenes instead as the smartest person in the room with a disdainful, withering comment for everyone and everything she … Continue reading Brooks, Buzzell, Freudenthal, Matzdorff, McKay
One Hour with You (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932). It’s a basic necessity to mention “The Lubitsch Touch” when evaluating one of the films from the great comic director, even if it’s simply to point out the absence of his trademark deftness in the work in question. One Hour with You is considered a fairly early effort–nearly a decade before revered classics like Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner, but, in the way of the era, the director already had dozens of films under his belt by this point. The film is a pretty odd duck, a soft-stepping musical about flirtations … Continue reading Dugan, Lubitsch, Mangold, Reitman, Taccone
I’ve had a little more modest output over at Spectrum Culture the past couple of weeks. I reviewed a Russian film called How I Ended This Summer about a burgeoning conflict between a couple of technicians at a remote weather station. Unfortunately, the frigid terrain they moved through looked a little too much like what was outside of our Carolina windows at the time. Luckily, that’s changed. Then this past week, I tapped into that distant part of me that stared down the copy of Dry that we received at the campus radio station nearly twenty years ago and tried … Continue reading Spectrum Check
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
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
Coffee for Two 