The title of the new film Spotlight refers to a special investigative journalism team at The Boston Globe. Treated as a somewhat separate and fairly autonomous entity within the culture of the venerable newspaper, the reporters in the Spotlight unit take on … Continue reading You know what everything’s about, you had to have a white hot spotlight
I will occasionally prepare for the release of a film adapted from a novel by reading the original source material. As a rule, I make every effort to view the resulting film as a separate entity, using my experience with … Continue reading I stand alone and watch the clock I only wait for it to stop
Maybe there’s just a limit as to how far any individual James Bond can go. The most enduring film franchise of them all, the one that basically invented the concept of the gentle reboot as a means to greater longevity, has had a commercial and (by most assessments) artistic resurgence in recent years, ever since Daniel Craig was tapped to take on the role of Special Agent 007. There have been loud rumblings that Spectre is the last spin with Her Majesty’s Secret Service for this particular agent, and the film is heavy with finality, even without the power of … Continue reading Stop and wonder, wonder, wonder, how you got so buried under trying to feel the way you felt much younger
Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014). Like just about everyone else, I believe The Lego Movie should have been Best Animated Feature Academy Award nominee (and I appreciate the creators’ inspired cheeky resilience in the face of the snub). After seeing Big Hero 6, though, I’m not sure naming the most worthy victor in the category was quite as simple as the chagrined consensus suggested. Developed after Disney Studios rummaged through the big trunk of misfit concepts stored up by their acquisition Marvel, the computer animated film about a young robotics genius who responds to personal hardship … Continue reading Baker, Baumbach, Endfield, Hall and Williams, Jacobs
There’s no disparaging the intent of the film Suffragette. To a large degree, the sterling motivation is spelled out by a crawl ahead of the closing credits which details when various countries across the globe first extended women the right to vote, including more than a few territories that did so only ridiculously recently. In depicting the harrowing track women had to follow to win suffrage in England, which was granted in compromised fashion in 1918 and then more in line with what was afforded men ten years later, director Sarah Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan strive for a echoing … Continue reading Oh don’t lean on me, man, ’cause you can’t afford the ticket
Aaron Sorkin is setting himself as the preferred cinematic chronicler of the major figures of the digital age. So far, that’s working out pretty well. Following The Social Network, Sorkin turns his keyboard to the one person who commands more attention and fascination than anyone else who’s made their millions (or, rather, billions) off of circuit boards fueling nearly miraculous tools of communication and information processing. The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and brilliant orchestrator of modern age cult of personality, has already been the subject of enough film treatments that it’s possible to create a considered list of … Continue reading We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times, people fighting over little things and wasting precious time.
Amazingly for a director who used to routinely face a barrage of critical darts for a supposed inability to progress past the childish stuff of frothy fantasy, Steven Spielberg has become one of the most dependable cinematic chroniclers of the planet’s tumultuous history. Across the last decade, with the odd exceptions of a misguided Indiana Jones sequel and a diversion into computer animation, Spielberg has been filming in the past. That’s not an entirely newfound preoccupation, of course. Even before Munich, which I’m using as the dividing line ahead of this era of Spileberg’s filmmaking, Spielberg kept cycling back to historical … Continue reading We don’t know the meaning of fear, we play every minute by ear
Guillermo del Toro takes a clear, unbridled pleasure in sharing the wildest worlds of his imagination. Like Wes Anderson — and this is probably the sole cinematic instinct the two directors have in common — del Toro loves to spread his favorite playthings all over the screen. While Anderson presents them meticulously arranged, under glass, and with an implicit instruction that they must not be touched or moved even a millimeter, del Toro upends the toy box and romps delightedly as the colorful contraptions come raining down. It’s not that he has no control. The film that remains his finest proves decisively … Continue reading Oh, now I don’t hardly know her
For a sizable portion of his career — at least since Back to the Future first positioned him to be able to take pricey risks in his projects — director Robert Zemeckis has been most enlivened by material that allows him some opportunity to bend the latest cinematic technology to the needs of classic Hollywood narrative. At its best, this has led to films where the exuberance of Zemeckis’s relentless invention gave truth to the overused term movie magic. It also led to an unfortunate stretch of years that found him stuck in the Uncanny Valley. Even at the most dire, the … Continue reading Tomorrow’s sun with buildings scrape the sky
Sicario, the new drug war drama directed by Denis Villeneuve, is delivered with the certainty that it has all sorts of profound things to offer about the dire state of the world. It is serious and intent, a brave face with just the merest hint of a quiver. Unfortunately, despite it’s stalwart intentions and clear self-regard, Sicario is a movie without much to actually say, a problem compounded by an overly stylized approach that makes its relative emptiness become almost unbearable. Written by Taylor Sheridan, the film purports to examine the cross-border drug trade with a barbed focus on the widespread … Continue reading The boys are worried, the girls are shocked, they pick the sound and let it drop
Coffee for Two 