Writer/director Rian Johnson gives Star Wars fans just about everything they could want in The Last Jedi, assuming they didn’t require it to follow the story beats, narrative cleanliness, and relatively consistent tone of The Empire Strikes Back. That, of course, means that Johnson has given a large number of fans what they didn’t want.
I love Jeff Bridges. I love Tim Robbins. I love them equally, and (my gut tells me) in about the same way. We are a ménage à trios, even if they don’t know it yet.
Nominated for its brevity, its simplicity, its expressiveness, and its sonic shape: “They’d boo free pie.”
A heretical question about Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood: Is Daniel Plainview a good person? The inquiry is an overstatement, because the answer is obvious: Of course not. But contrary to the assessments of many critics, I don’t think Plainview is evil, and more than that I’m not convinced he’s much different from most of us. Plus: Michael Clayton.
Neil Marshall’s The Descent approaches being a perfect terror movie. And because terror is unique to cinema among art forms – it doesn’t translate well to the page because the narrative has to slow down for the reader, and it doesn’t translate at all to any other medium – The Descent approaches being a perfect movie, period.
Werner Herzog once ate his shoe, so why wouldn’t he chase the Loch Ness monster? What’s a little harder to swallow is that the famously idiosyncratic German director – who pulled a boat over a mountain for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo – would team up with Zak Penn, a Hollywood hack who has written such gems as PCU, Inspector Gadget, and Elektra. Yet that’s what happens in Incident at Loch Ness, a 2004 movie that documents their collaboration.
Why oh why did I assent to River Cities’ Reader film critic Mike Schulz’s inebriated suggestion that we record a commentary track for Lady in the Water?
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love is not bad, exactly, just anxious and annoying and perfectly framed and puzzling. It does make a certain amount of sense, though, if you look at from my skewed perspective.
Somebody entered the following search query and eventually found Culture Snob: “talent OR skill OR intelligence ‘rupert grint'”
I’ve been otherwise occupied for a while, but I finally got around to inviting Christopher Nolan to dinner. (Not literally, of course. Still, that invitation should be clear.) He hasn’t accepted yet, but I hear he’s busy, too.
