Tag: new movie review

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And I still remember all those days we spent alone

Dan Seeger

Carol, the latest film from Todd Haynes, is unyieldingly admirable in almost every way that matters in the construction of great cinema. The screenplay, adapted by Phyllis Nagy from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, is meticulous and thoughtful, spelling out the conflicts of the main characters in a determined, empathetic fashion. The performances evidence an equal amount of care. Maybe more than anything, Haynes’s directing job, heavily abetted by the cinematography of Edward Lachman, is the sort that can be studied for decades, held up as the embodiment of the way that images can be framed and finessed to tell … Continue reading And I still remember all those days we spent alone

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Inside this stillness is a wave, a force from which we won’t be saved

Dan Seeger

It’s not that the entire career of Adam McKay makes it appear that he’s have no interest in, much less facility for, an adaptation of The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s fury-stirring 2010 book about the fiscal malfeasance that precipitated the real estate collapse of 2007. Time as a head writer of Saturday Night Live is inked into his resume, meaning there’s got to be at least some amount of political awareness in his skill set, and the Funny or Die website, which he co-founded, has demonstrated a regular willingness to use broad, hooky gags as a delivery vessel for pointed, … Continue reading Inside this stillness is a wave, a force from which we won’t be saved

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Be careful for the danger there, you just might just be unprepared

Dan Seeger

Like a lot of people that devote themselves to inordinate amounts of time spent in movie theaters, I have a tendency to equate novelty with accomplishment. Though I maintain a thick enough strain of cynicism to avoid knee-jerk genuflection before hollow material tricked up with self-congratulatory narrative gimmicks (this is where I’d link to a review of Fight Club if I had one), I am absolutely more prone to fall for movies that do something decidedly different, filling the screen before me with something that I’ve never quite seen before. I’d naturally assumed that predilection came from an altogether commonplace impulse … Continue reading Be careful for the danger there, you just might just be unprepared

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Stop and wonder, wonder, wonder, how you got so buried under trying to feel the way you felt much younger

Dan Seeger

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

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Oh don’t lean on me, man, ’cause you can’t afford the ticket

Dan Seeger

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

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We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times, people fighting over little things and wasting precious time.

Dan Seeger

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.

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We don’t know the meaning of fear, we play every minute by ear

Dan Seeger

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