If Critics Were King-Makers
If movie critics chose Oscar nominations, then, here are two possibilities of what they might look like.
Tagged: Academy Awards, Critics, Oscars
Resistance Is Futile
I fought Millions for as long as I could. But in the end, it won. It’s a charming little movie that casts magical realism as the mind of a child. Plus: an easy dismissal of Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Can’t Escape the Zydeco
The story of Stanley Dural Jr. is the story of a kid who hated his father’s music. The rich irony is that the kid who hated the accordion and zydeco would become the planet’s best-known zydeco performer. His nickname is “Buckwheat,” and the world knows him as Buckwheat Zydeco – a multiple Grammy nominee and the first zydeco artist ever signed to a major label.
Building Up by Tearing Down
I’m about 15 years late to this party, but I’ve always planned to write a lengthy piece on my love for Oliver Stone’s JFK. My point would simply be that whatever its failings as a credible history (or even a viable alternative history), JFK excels as propaganda, and should be studied for that reason. In a 1993 essay in The Atlantic, Edward Jay Epstein does a good job explaining Stone’s methods.
Tagged: JFK, Oliver Stone, Politics, Propaganda
Nietzsche Is a Punk Rocker
It is a great world in which the names of Nietzsche and Kant can be invoked in a discussion of popular music.
The Movies That Were Not There
David Wong offers “The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed.” (And, yes, it’s geeky.) The title is cool because it’s accurate while having its own little sci-fi vibe. The content is cool because Wong brings to the task a keen understanding of what works (and how it works) in narrative and in movies.
Tagged: George Lucas, Science Fiction, Star Wars
Full Throttle
Two articles this week in The Motley Fool explore the practice of “throttling” at online-DVD-rental outlets Netflix and Blockbuster. Basically, if you watch and return a certain number of movies a month, you’re likely to experience longer turn-around times and reduced availability.
Tagged: Netflix
Crash and the Coasts
Blogger Anthony Kaufman makes an astute observation about the divided critical reaction to Paul Haggis’ Oscar-nominated Crash: “According to the top-ten lists available, not a single critic who resides in New York or Los Angeles placed Crash in their top five. … So the vast majority of Crash fans come from everywhere in between.” Kaufman concludes that this is a function of the movie being simple and unsophisticated.
Tagged: Crash, Critics, Paul Haggis
No School for Scandal
Imagine a mystery story in which the detective started to explain the killer’s method and motive, paused 30 seconds in, and said, “It’s pretty convoluted. Let’s skip that part.” That’s how the Oscar-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room works.
A Lean, Mean Shakespearean Machine
That Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy works at all is surprising. It’s hilariously contrived, wildly improbable, and at times downright goofy in its broad comedy, most of it based in the main character’s unleashed id. The movie’s underlying self-seriousness runs so deep that it threatens to become its own form of silliness. And its pitch is constant extremity, from acute rage to blubbering desperation. Yet the effect is not tonal incongruity, but a messy mix of emotions that’s true to its protagonist.
Tagged: Chan-wook Park, Foreign-Language Films, Oldboy, Revenge, Reviews, Torture
