The question of what actually happened with Nora hangs over the finale of The Leftovers, but it is finally unknowable in any conclusive sense. Yet as much as the finale’s approach invites speculation, questions, and theories, it also tells us how to process it.
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is an incredibly ballsy movie. I don’t mean its scope and ambition, both of which are indeed impressive. I mean the audacity of choices that could have easily backfired: following Heath Ledger’s nuanced, razor-sharp Joker with the nearly blank thug Bane; recycling Batman Begins’ sinister plot, doomsday machine, and League of Shadows; inserting teenage-boy masturbation fantasy Catwoman into a universe largely devoid of sex appeal and camp (and non-Rachel Dawes women, period); crafting a lengthy, convoluted first act made even less comprehensible because of the sound design and score; and relegating Batman to captivity of one sort or another for the vast majority of the movie’s first 115 minutes.
Nominated for its brevity, its simplicity, its expressiveness, and its sonic shape: “They’d boo free pie.”
Somebody entered the following search query and eventually found Culture Snob: “talent OR skill OR intelligence ‘rupert grint'”
It’s probably only a slight overstatement that Kronos Quartet has done more than anybody else to bring “classical” music to the rock world, by playing the music of Jimi Hendrix and Mr. Bungle but also by taking it seriously, and without sniggering.
For the past three decades, Tim O’Brien has been trying to tell true war stories – even though most of them, strictly speaking, are fiction.
Pretty self-explanatory: Martin Sexton’s one-hour set at River Roots Live in Davenport, Iowa, on Friday, September 22, 2006.
We were in the play area of the department store – most likely building things with Legos – and two girls were taking great delight in excluding me. They were speaking a language I didn’t understand, and it wasn’t exactly a private conversation. They would glance my way during their exchange and occasionally laugh. I felt mocked, which was exactly what they wanted. They were speaking Pig Latin, I figured out later. Of course, Pig Latin is only effective as a private language through a certain age, but we update and upgrade our codes throughout our lives.
In Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a high-angle shot of George W. Bush is followed by a shot of Al Gore looking down out of an airplane window. The juxtaposition delivers a subtle but forceful message: Al Gore is God, gazing in harsh judgment on this Republican president.
The oft-stated (and obviously fallacious) stakes are that Miramax needs Project Greenlight movies to be financial successes for the studio to continue bankrolling the enterprise. The unstated reality is that Greenlight will never produce a decent movie until it drastically changes the way it operates.
