John Wall

John Wall

"has just enough vision to be discontented with his lot, but not enough drive to achieve escape velocity."

Favorite films

  • Days of Heaven
  • Gosford Park
  • Rabbits
  • Long Vacation

Recent activity

All
  • There's Still Tomorrow

  • Universal Language

  • Black Bag

  • In the Lost Lands

Recent reviews

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  • Seven Samurai

    Seven Samurai

    I was about to write this whole apologetica on how me and the kids of my generation have this common disconnect with Seven Samurai. In this disconnect, there’s always a recognition for the filmcraft, the incredible sense of space within the action (has mud ever looked better?), but there’s this sense that the movie is emotionally or thematically unsophisticated; that it doesn’t live up to the expectations its place in history has provided. I was gonna try and craft some…

  • Twister

    Twister

    .....it's still no "Twister...Ride it Out"...

    "To generate the full size effect, it was necessary to generate constant winds of 35 miles per hour. A studio was outfitted with thirty specially designed fans arranged in three tiers; ground level, mid level, and high level. Eighteen of those fans had blades seven feet tall... [This] took place inside of a 25,000 square foot soundstage on a set that resembled an outdoor scene. Visitors filed on to a elevated viewing platform and…

Popular reviews

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  • Cocaine Bear

    Cocaine Bear

    The titular attraction to this movie is remarkably absent for what one might hope for. It is pointless to go into the character motivations and plot strings that serve no function other than re-assuring you that this is in fact a movie and there are indeed characters. All I'll say is that I would have vastly preferred a 90 minute version of the Ambulance scene w/n/r/t pacing.

    The only reason this exists: ten years from now, a kid can walk…

  • Challengers

    Challengers

    As a lover of tennis in fiction and non-fiction, I obviously ate up all the tennis formal metaphors, the non-linearity mirroring the back-and-forth of a long tennis match, the overt metaphor of tennis as a relationship, the ultimate sport about relationship. Though noticing them is unavoidable for anybody that has engaged with a certain piece of tennis fiction, as spending the proper amount of time with it takes about as long as it takes to get decent at tennis.

    After…