Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021). Following the inspired The Big Short and the unwatchable Vice, director Adam McKay continues his run as a satiric auteur of lefty outrage with this onion skin–thin allegory of political indifference to the climate … Continue reading Then Playing — Don’t Look Up; Paper Moon; The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Before Peter Bogdanovich made movies, he loved movies. That doesn’t seem all that unique, but it was still a relatively new trajectory into the artform in the late nineteen-sixties, when the grand old men of Hollywood’s Golden Age (and it … Continue reading Actors’ Director — Peter Bogdanovich
Rampage (Brad Peyton, 2018). I fully understand the wisdom in calibrating expectations accordingly for a movie adaptation of a 1986 video game that was little more than giant monsters knocking down buildings. Basic coherence isn’t too much to ask for, … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Rampage; What’s Up, Doc?; River of No Return
#47 — Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) Sometimes stories from the heyday of Roger Corman’s low-budget productions–when he was regularly able to attract highly skilled filmmakers who needed a break and didn’t have the option of cheapo homemade digital production to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Forty-Seven
#9 — The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) There’s a beautiful desolation at the heart of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, a echoing ache that’s given physical form by the scorched, dusty streets of the dying nineteen-fifties Texas town … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Nine
Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977). There’s certainly no reason to expect anything less than inspired lunacy from a Werner Herzog movie, especially one he made back in the nineteen-seventies when thew rules of cinema were falling away like worn paint from a waterlogged wall. Stroszek follows a German man whose perilous romance with a prostitute causes him to move with her and his elderly neighbor to, of all places, rural Wisconsin. From there, Herzog’s examination of the general travails of the downtrodden trying to forge better lives takes on the added harsh tinge of the false promise of the American dream … Continue reading Bailey and Barbato, Bogdanovich, Herzog, Kurosawa, Margolis
Coffee for Two 