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A Dangerous Delusion: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is of course a remarkable achievement, a massive production with epic scope, a clever structure, and one of the best possible showcases for Technicolor. But I’m evidently so far out of step with the consensus on this one that I’m doubting my…
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Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy…
…but being invited to your own party is hard. I remember liking Grant Gee’s Radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy when I first saw it in the late nineties, but now it just looks like a simplistic feature-length exposé of how music journos are twits that ruin everything.
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Snausage Fest: Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs
I was rather astonished to find Isle of Dogs defeat my expectations and become one of my least favorite Wes Andersons, if not the least. Anderson is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers (I know, I know, join the club), but like a lot of my faves, I have significant reservations. It’s no great insight…
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Ernest Borgnine’s Marty rejects toxic masculinity, long before we had a name for it
In Delbert Mann and Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty (1955), Ernest Borgnine plays a basically decent man, trapped in a kind of stasis by social forces that are only more amplified today: misogyny, distrust of the educated, racism, and classism. Even the changing economic landscape looms over him, as corporate consolidation threatens his dream to own a…
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Famously chill dude Keanu Reeves goes on a killing spree in John Wick: Chapter 2
I want to enjoy action movies like the popular John Wick franchise, but the gun worship spoils everything.
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The Accountant is A Brilliant Mind meets Death Wish
You can imagine the elevator pitch: “A Brilliant Mind meets Death Wish! Ben Affleck! Anna Kendrick!” Director Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant flirts with righteous anger at big business financial corruption, but wimps out by ultimately fingering a single venal individual with a hired army of faceless mercenaries. There’s nothing engaging about a plot that can…
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Everything is… fine… in The Intern
Nancy Meyer’s 2015 trifle The Intern is a little outside the usual scope of this blog, but it sparked a couple thoughts I needed to get out: What a waste of a decent premise: a retiree reenters a transformed workforce, while the young founder of a startup grapples with success. But so little is at…
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Businessman, artiste, or madman? We Live in Public
If you dig the deeply cynical TV series Black Mirror, you’ll love this documentary profile of businessman/artiste/madman Josh Harris. Love, hate, or pity him, Harris is undoubtedly a fascinating individual who succumbed to information-age and surveillance state delusion back during a time when we still used terms like “cyber-surfing the information superhighway” to describe the…
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Petrochemicals, munitions, and Aqua-Cola: Mad Max: Fury Road
A dystopia ruled by three corporate fiefdoms: petrochemicals, munitions, and Aqua-Cola. A diseased and starving population terrorized by a religious army motivated by martyrdom. A decadent ruling class reliant upon the subjugation of women. Environmental collapse. Car culture run amok. It must be escapist summer blockbuster season! In case I sound too snarky, let me…
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Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy make an odd couple in The Counselor
Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott were bound to be an odd couple in any case. All the richly composed and poetic dialogue in the world doesn’t disguise the fact The Counselor is basically a grimy, scuzzy, sleazy, feel-bad potboiler. There is an element of pulp to several of McCarthy’s novels, but here it’s brought to…
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Riddick makes the most haphazard of movie franchises
When even the humblest movies are planned to allow for multiple sequels if at all financially feasible, the Riddick trilogy (and counting?) must be one of the most haphazard of movie franchises. I doubt many would have expected any kind of sequel at all to 2000’s Pitch Black, and yet The Chronicles of Riddick appeared…
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William Friedkin’s The Hunted is solid but unsatisfying
After watching too many sloppily-made thrillers filling up space on Netflix (including Mercury Rising, Double Jeopardy, and Along Came a Spider), it’s a relief the my next choice, The Hunted, is so solidly made. You really can’t expect anything less from William Friedkin. So why is it so unsatisfying? First, it doesn’t really capitalize on…