I don’t have a signed document to this effect or anything, but I do believe I have previously pledged to follow director Steven Soderbergh anywhere. That has brought me some undue misery over the years, but I’ve largely stuck by … Continue reading I feel the magic like I never felt before, I imagine that it’s always been there
Longer ago than I care to admit (it can be measured in decades, sadly), I first started reviewing movies on a weekly radio program, originally adopting the strategy of treating each new film as strictly its own entity. Theoretically, a sizable percentage of our listening audience would be coming to these films fairly fresh, with no working knowledge of the director’s wider oeuvre, the history of the production or any of the other odd particulars that can fill the heads of seasoned moviegoers as the lights go dim in the theater. I figured I should do the best I could … Continue reading Now he’s up above my head, hanging by a little thread
Falling in love can be treacherous business. The flush of excitement when interest clicks over to happy infatuation is undeniably thrilling, but it also foretells all the moments in the future when it won’t quite live up to the earlier … Continue reading In the spiritual kingdom of love, you’re the one that I’m thinkin’ of
Just over twenty-five years into their existence as Pixar and over fifteen years since they shifted the foundations of film with Toy Story, the computer animation studio that can make as much of a claim towards auteurship as any major … Continue reading I walked away from everyone I know, I looked around and thought, This must be what it’s like to be alone
Great pains have been taken in recent weeks to preserve the mystery and secrets of Prometheus, the film that represents director Ridley Scott’s return to the franchise which he unwittingly launched over thirty years ago with 1979’s Alien, before the notion that film concepts could go on forever and ever through endless sequels and reboots. A big screen secret agent with a habit of introducing himself last name first was about the only example of such a process of constant recycling that has now became the norm. It was widely known that Prometheus was more of a prequel, all the … Continue reading The walls were crumbling, the wheels were coming off
I would think that working on a film that grounds itself in the logic of fairy tales is very freeing. The parameters of plausibility widen quite a bit when the plot is inherently open to fairies, haunted forests and nasty … Continue reading Where’s my nurse, I need some healing. I’ve been paralyzed by a lack of feeling.
It never seemed like Whit Stillman was going to be prolific. There were four years between his 1990 debut Metropolitan and the largely forgotten follow-up Barcelona and then another four years before his third film, 1998’s The Last Days of … Continue reading Don’t you think every kitten figures out how to get down whether or not you ever show up?
Popular taste has finally converged with the oeuvre of Joss Whedon. The writer-director has been a feverishly beloved cult hero since at least the point very early in the run of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it … Continue reading Though nothing will keep us together, we could steal time just for one day
Cabin in the Woods, the new collaboration between Buffyverse compatriots Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, positions itself as a cheeky deconstruction of the horror movie. At it’s very best moments, and they are plentiful, it achieves something more: it becomes … Continue reading Deep in the woods a funeral is swinging
As if there were any doubt left on this point, The Hunger Games seals the certainty that studios that once rejected aspirations towards art in favor of a fervent craving for franchises are now slipping to a point where nothing … Continue reading Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games, hiding out in tree tops, shouting out rude names
Coffee for Two 