In HBO’s psychotherapy melodrama In Treatment, Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) shares a counselor’s riddle with a patient: “Why doesn’t a cigarette smoker think a cigarette can kill him?”… Continue reading "An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) — 10 Years Later"
When was the last time you actually watched Snow White?
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominees for the Oscars this week. With the exception of the omission of Todd Haynes’s Carol (a film I… Continue reading "My Best Picture Choice: Spotlight"
I hate to use the word "sweet" when describing a film. There's no way to make it not sound like a backhanded compliment.
A lot of movies show people trapped in hell; this one shows them constructing it.
The ten finalists are: About Elly, The Assassin, Brooklyn, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, Inside Out, The Look of Silence; Love & Mercy, Spotlight, Stations of the Cross, and Timbuktu.
I love movies. These are the ones I loved the most last year...
I've mostly been a Tarantino fan, but even I can't defend this...
As mimicry, it is good. As fan-service, it is serviceable. But it adds nothing to the underlying tapestry. Whatever pleasures are there are imported from other movies. The audience applauds when the actors enter, but that's only out of respect for their past work. Could you imagine if J, K. Rowling did an eighth Harry Potter book and it was the next generation running through the same plot as the last? If Go Set A Watchmen had been about another trial of another African-American, a year later?
The Big Short is about people who got rich by short-selling credit default swaps--people who made obscene amounts of money by being able to accurately predict the suffering of others. That they themselves were not the root cause of the suffering makes it possible for us as viewers to not hate them; it doesn't necessarily keep them--or Baum at least--from hating themselves.
