Drama school dropout. English teacher-certified Byronic hero. Known at work as the funny t-shirt guy.
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The Iron Claw 2023
Not totally immune to the more eye-roll-inducing tropes of your average biopic, but more artful than most, with more on its mind, and self-evidently made because the filmmaker found it a story worth telling, complete with resonant themes worth exploring, and not just because the subject happened to be famous.
It’s not a subtle film. Words like blunt, cheesy, and heavy-handed come to mind. For instance, a more interesting version of the story might have let the brothers be occasionally…
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Asteroid City 2023
I’m a sucker for a frame narrative, and especially a double frame narrative. I’m also a sucker for postmodernism. So when frames and double frames (and triple frames) start bleeding into one another and overlapping and otherwise getting their wires crossed, I’m a veritable pig in shit. But let me not get ahead of myself. First and foremost, Asteroid City is a sweet, sad, triumphant, humanistic tale of grief and puppy love and frustrated intelligence and the catharses of the…
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Oppenheimer 2023
Handsome and well-acted with a couple of sequences of legitimately bravura filmmaking, but ultimately a pretty standard biopic, and I’m bored by biopics. Nolan is a better director than writer. His dialogue is too cute and on-the-nose for something that so evidently wants to be taken very, very seriously. White men standing around talking in suits can be done well (see 12 Angry Men, The Godfather, Michael Clayton, Mad Men, etc), but the dialogue has to be crackling. Nolan’s is…
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The Whale 2022
An assault on the empathy centers of the brain. So grotesque at times that it would be comical if not for how viscerally upsetting it is. Is there any point to watching this sweet, almost pathologically sincere man commit slow suicide-by-junk food while the vanishing few people left in his life treat him with callousness at best and cruelty at worst? Any wisdom or insight into the human condition to be gleaned? Or is it merely the cinematic equivalent of…
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