Dir. Peter Weir. Starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Max Pirkis From whatever side you look at it, Master and Commander feels like a movie that was destined to be forgotten. It’s a movie about sailing and naval combat and intrigue which premiered the same year as Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. It would have been… Read More Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Matt and I return, adding another unnecessary element to the title of the podcast (it’s possibly the B&B B&B Suite now, which is punny and dumb and relates back to the punny, dumb stuff we do), but more importantly biting off more than we can chew. Both of us burrowed back into our little musical… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 32: The Kirk, Spock, and McCoy of 2000s Alt-Rock
Dir. Jason Reitman. Starring Aaron Eckhart, William H. Macy, Cameron Bright In 2005, when this movie first came out, I’m not sure that the slide with the names of four executive producers, men without any real creative input on the film, would have raised many eyebrows. In 2017, watching a movie that has the names… Read More Thank for You Smoking (2005)
Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Starring William Shatner, Ricardo Montalban, Leonard Nimoy 1:34:51– What I will say is that the dude holding Terrell looks exactly like a sad Will Ferrell. When I wrote that back in May of 2013, I was in the habit of writing about movies and TV with linear recaps rather than the more… Read More Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) – Redux
Dir. Damien Chazelle. Starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend Early in the film, Mia (Stone) has a pretty bad day. She gets cut off by a guy in an old car while she’s practicing a monologue she’s going to audition with. She’s late for the audition itself, has to rush out of her coffee… Read More La La Land (2016)
Dir. Morten Tyldum. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Allen Leech The Imitation Game is structurally deficient. By virtually any standard it’s got all of the best elements of a good biopic: a well-known (but not too well-known) historical figure with some relevance to even casual viewers, a story which relates back to an important historical… Read More The Imitation Game (2014)
Dir. Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, Tom Tykwer. Starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Doona Bae Mark Harris, whose best work as a film critic concerns the larger trend of American studios making the safest decisions possible to the detriment of American film, has spent years on the topic by now. I don’t know what his opinion… Read More Cloud Atlas (2012)
Dir. Dan Gilroy. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rene Russo Lou Bloom (Gyllenhaal) is an enterprising American entrepreneur. Almost entirely self-trained, with the help of some business classes from the Internet, he represents the “school of hard knocks” approach to building a company. Through a combination of dogged persistence, on-scene training, hard work, and a… Read More Nightcrawler (2014)
In this edition of the podcast, Matt and I let our thoughts fly free about Rogue One. We get down and dirty to talk about acceptable terrorism, make a rather tasteless comparison between one character and Oskar Schindler, praise the ability of a cast without a single A-lister, and preview our next podcast, where we’ll find a… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 31: I See the Bad Death Star Rising
Dir. Denis Villeneuve. Starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker Amy Adams’ star image is like a braid. One strand is defined by Enchanted, but also includes Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Junebug, Catch Me if You Can, Julie and Julia, and The Muppets. Adams is, for my money, the most beautiful redheaded actress… Read More Arrival (2016)
Seeing Things Secondhand 