Tag: movies
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Wendell Berry: Coming Soon to a Screen
Hat-tip to Rod Dreher for spotlighting The Seer, an upcoming documentary on Wendell Berry that counts Nick Offerman, Terrence Malick, and Robert Redford as backers. The filmmaker Laura Dunn has worked for years to bring the film to life, and now has a Kickstarter campaign to fund the remaining post-production costs. It’s due to premiere at…
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Better Living Through Criticism
I’ve been a fan of A.O. Scott since his too-short time co-hosting At the Movies with Michael Phillips, which was my favorite post-Ebert iteration of the show. Their tenure was a salve after the brief and forgettable stint of Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz. Phillips and Scott brought a benevolent wonkiness to the show I…
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Adventures in Logbooking
Looking at my logbook, I noticed that I recently had a string of four starred books or movies in a row, the longest streak yet. (It would have been five in a row had I seen Brooklyn before Love & Mercy, which I liked a lot but not star-liked.) 749 Typewriter Revolution, The Richard Polt…
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From Chicago, A ‘Brooklyn’ Homage
It was a pleasure and an honor to attend Filmspotting’s 2015 Wrap Party at the Mayne Stage on January 9. I’ve been an avid listener for a few years, and finally became a regular donor last year, so with that evening off I jumped at the chance to go to a live show. A few days…
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The Big Short
The scene in The Big Short that encapsulates the entire sad, tragic, enraging economic failure it covers is a short one. After Lehman Brothers collapses, the dejected horde of laid-off employees are shown streaming out of the building, bewildered and holding their bankers boxes of personal items, as an executive (which in the script is…
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Love & Mercy
As biopics go, Love & Mercy is more interesting than most. I liked how the two arcs and time periods of Brian Wilson’s life start off on their own but then slowly merge like converging highways. Having ’90s Brian in our heads as we watch ’60s Brian slowly devolve personally and psychologically, even as he peaks…
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The Hunt for Vulcan
I’ve never forgotten the scene in Men in Black, when Jay (Will Smith) and Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) are sitting on a bench facing the New York City skyline. Jay has gotten a brief but shocking glimpse of the secret alien world Kay is trying to recruit him into, one that few people know about.…
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Citizenfour
The hotel’s fire alarm testing in Citizenfour = the nighttime controlled explosions in Force Majeure. I wonder how well this documentary would work with someone who knew nothing of Edward Snowden, who wasn’t aware of the NSA leak when it happened and its subsequent firestorm. Without knowing that context ahead of time and carrying it…
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A Reader’s Guide to ‘Back to the Future’
I noticed a motif of paper, reading, and the written word throughout the Back to the Future trilogy. Perhaps that’s much more common in movies set in pre-Internet times, but I thought it was especially prevalent in the Holy Trilogy. (Tap/click photos to enlarge) Part I: Part 2: Part 3:
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Closing the Almanac
On the Fandom-Industrial Complex and Moving Forward from Back to the Future The day Back to the Future fans have waited for is finally here. The thirty-year countdown to October 21, 2015, one of the most well-known dates in movie history (despite how often it has been incorrectly reported on the interwebs), is over. There’s…
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The Martian
I conducted an experiment with The Martian. Too many times I’ve read a book before seeing its movie version and have come out of the theater disappointed they didn’t show this or showed too much of that, and above all that I knew what was going to happen. Seems the conventional wisdom is that you…
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We Don’t Need Roads
Caseen Gaines, author of Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon, leads this year’s deluge of commentary honoring the Back to the Future trilogy’s 30th anniversary with a wide-ranging and lovingly crafted retrospective on the development, production, and long afterlife of the 1985 time-travel classic. Built upon extensive interviews with cast, crew, studio executives,…
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Pay attention during ‘Children of Men’
I noticed the bustling in the background during my first viewing of Children of Men, but it was overshadowed by the main plot and everything else going on. It wasn’t until the second or third viewing when I started paying attention.
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Slow West
The refrain from Thomas Hood’s nineteenth century poem “The Haunted House” stands out not only because it appears about halfway through Slow West, John Mclean’s darkly funny reverie of a western, but because its final line—“The place is Haunted!”—breaks the iambic pentameter the poem employs throughout the rest of its eighty-five stanzas. Such a break jars…
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Inside Out
Here be spoilers. So just go see Inside Out. The part of Inside Out that made me teary was at the end when Riley returns home from her aborted runaway attempt and admits to her parents her true feelings, which by then had been overtaken by Sadness, Anger, and Fear mostly. Her parents don’t yell at…
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H is for Hawk
David Fincher’s Gone Girl opens gazing upon the back of Amy’s blond head. Her husband Nick, in voice-over: “The primal questions of a marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?” I thought of this while reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, when Macdonald’s gaze tried…