Surely Michael Shannon will get the chance to play a nice, normal guy in a prominent role one of these days. He’ll get cast as someone who clearly sees reality just as it is and faces no burdensome difficulty brought … Continue reading Well all right, you gave it all up for a dream, fate proved unkind to lock the door and leave no key
Once I started writing music reviews for Spectrum Culture, one of my goals was to eventually branch out and try to cover material that’s somewhat outside of my normal range. So for my last album review of the year, I made a point of grabbing a hip hop release. Lucky for me, it just so happens to be one of the best records of the year. I did the best I could, but I wish I’d had a little more concentrated time with the album before I wrote on it. I have a feeling this one is going to age … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972). This intricate, cerebral, elusive drama from the acknowledged master of intricate, cerebral, elusive dramas takes place at stately mansion at the end of the 19th century. A woman named Agnes, played by Harriet Andersson, is on her deathbed and is seen to by her two sisters, both returned home due to their sibling’s terrible need, and the loving household maid. Each character gets their own individual segment, usually devoted to a flashback to some terrible emotional incident in the past, Bergman scraping at their existential agony like a merciless physician slicing at a poisonous … Continue reading Arteta, Bergman, Howard, Newman, van Heijningen
I absolutely love the first and last shots of Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. Each of them encompasses everything I like about his work in their straightforwardness, their simplicity, their understatement and their quiet, careful wit. These shots don’t push an … Continue reading Almost ready, almost there, or is it already over?
The first thing of mine that went up on Spectrum Culture this week was an attempt to write on a new music release that was outside of my normal wheelhouse. Punk music speaks to the inner part of me that still craves the opportunity to descend into a basement somewhere and turn the stereo playing the angriest music I can find with the volume turned up as loud as it will go. Another challenge: the whole EP is less than ten minutes long. Writing a full-length review about something like that is a challenge. I think I did all right. … Continue reading Spectrum Check
One of the regular features at Spectrum Culture is called “Film Dunce,” in which a writer makes a point of viewing and considering a film they haven’t previously watched that they feel everyone else has seen. I’ve used my past entries to review significant works that I considered blind spots in my broader knowledge of hefty, important cinema. This time out, I was challenged to instead watch something more broadly popular that I hadn’t seen. The editor was pushing a particular comedy, but I have my limits. In general, I’m enough of a completist about these things that most widely … Continue reading Spectrum Check
It’s be hard to find another film as awash in enthusiasm for its subject as The Muppets. Written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, who directed Segel’s previously produced screenplay Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the movie is really just Segel’s extended … Continue reading Footloose and fancy-free, getting there is half the fun, come share it with me
Though I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it, I still find it very odd to think of the director Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Departed presiding over a movie largely targeted at children, or at … Continue reading Hugo’s not afraid to cry, Hugo is an okay guy
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975). Gene Hackman plays a seedy private detective named Harry Moseby who gets drawn into a case that involves tracking down a missing teenage girl, played by Melanie Griffith in one of her first real film roles. The film is entirely of its era, in good and bad ways. It’s nicely gritty and dark, but it also gets completely mired in a sense of existential dread until it become subsumed by its own fatalism. Nothing good can even come of this world, which the film labors to proves across its overly calculated third act. The film … Continue reading Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson
With my countdown of nineteen-eighties films approaching the end, I’ve been trying to both watch and rewatch important movies from the prior decade in preparation for the next naturally step backwards in my tops of the decade project. As for the latter endeavor, there are simply some movies that I haven’t seen in approaching thirty years (and perhaps never saw properly, given that my exposure to them was dictated by the way I watched the material on cable, not always the most ideal manner to take them in) and in order to figure out their placement on the pending list, … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Coffee for Two 