Incredible from the first time you see one of those masterful portrait shots. Trades in this intimacy that I haven't seen on film - at least not in this way. About the maddening lines of loyalty that cross between family, love, school, and business at all stages of life.
Yi Yi finds us at those kinds of crossroads, intermixing a birth, a death, a change in career, a religious epiphany, the resurrection of an old love, the demise of a…
Took a while just to sit and think this one over. My initial reaction was that this is a story about how love can be a manipulative force, that the white man takes a falsely caring, paternalistic posture in his exploitation of indigenous peoples. That Scorsese gives life to Kipling's conception of the "white man's burden" to "civilize the savages," and he does so by depicting a mixed society in the same manner that the Carlisle Indian School justified its…
This activated the same centers in my brain as an airport John Grisham novel. The kind of meat-and-potatos academy drama that used to crop up 4 or 5 times a year a generation ago. Totally enthralling in a way that's simple but juuust rewarding enough to keep you going - it strings reveals one after the other. Drip feeding information while revolving the papal candidates like cans of green beans on a lazy Susan. I love that, I stepped out…
The most 2009 comedy ever made. Reasonably funny, reasonably well shot. Watched this sometime around the Paul-Tyson fight because it was already playing off the "Mike Tyson is old and sorta cuddly now" thing 15 years ago.
Very cool that Bradley Cooper made bank off the 3 of these and immediately turned around to become the director Todd Phillips always wanted to be.
This movie has some of the stupidest, ugliest images I've seen in years. Just unmitigated dog water. They build the whole movie around Zack and Cody learning empathy and understanding each other, then they have to save the day by throwing that out and fighting like nothing happened? So what was the point then? This movie was the biggest thing in the world when I was 13.
The American Climax, an astounding depiction of interwar opulence and the artiface meant to protect people from their own debauchery. The creation of an American aristocracy through the motion picture, as the whims of the court decide who is king and who is jester. The most deeply cynical and hateful movie of the year, but one built in the image of its idols, Singin in the Rain most prominently.
If cinema is the living record of our sins, then to…
