Dir. Joe Wright. Starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan In the past twenty years, I think moviegoers’ penchant for a twist ending has become stronger. People have always loved having that “Whoa!” moment at the end of a film – Vertigo and Psycho both indulge here – but since The Usual Suspects I think our appetites have been… Read More Atonement (2007)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brendan Gleeson Gangs of New York is the movie that made me love movies, which is like saying that All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the album which made someone love music. I apologize for nothing. The first half of Gangs of New York is remarkable. In 1862, Irish… Read More Gangs of New York (2002)
Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Starring Paul Scofield, Leo McKern, John Hurt Watching A Man for All Seasons forces the viewer to put The Crucible on the brain. Thomas More is the antithesis of John Proctor; where Proctor sees himself already neck-deep in the quicksand of his sin, Thomas More walks on water. Yet both are on trial, both of… Read More A Man for All Seasons (1966)
Dir. Nicholas Hytner. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Scofield, Joan Allen I always get nervous when writers get to redo their own work. George Lucas is the alpha and omega of this model, but fans of Amadeus or The Crucible or Doubt must know that even when excellent playwrights turn into screenwriters, they find themselves touching up scenes or… Read More The Crucible (1996)
Dir. Michael Haneke. Starring Burghart Klaußner, Christian Friedel, Susanne Lothar There’s a scene fairly early in The White Ribbon where the schoolteacher, fishing for trout, sees one of his students – Martin, the pastor’s eldest son, maybe twelve or thirteen years old – walking on the rail of a wooden bridge high above the stream. If he fell,… Read More The White Ribbon (2009)
As anyone who has ever taken a high school French class knows, French high school functions differently from American high school. There’s more emphasis placed on a single test in France than there is in the U.S. (here we tend to spread our attention around to about a dozen), and students get part of their… Read More How to Make College Football and Basketball Work: A Series of Options
Dir. Wolfgang Becker. Starring Daniel Bruhl, Katrin Saß, Maria Simon After her husband escapes to the west, a single mother of two, Christiane Kerner (Saß), becomes deeply involved in East German politics. The government is grateful. Such people are common enough in any nation: they devote themselves at a local level and become symbols at… Read More Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)
Dir. Lone Scherfig. Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina Movies about young adults very frequently – that is, always – feel a need to tell the audience that their characters change. One’s teenage years [he sighed while cleaning his eyeglasses] are the beginning of a life’s summer, after a springlike childhood and before the autumn… Read More An Education (2009)
In this episode – our tenth! – Matt and I talk about a pair of our favorite books. Matt talks about how Anil’s Ghost literally changed the trajectory of his life, making some stops along the way for discussions of epistemology; I make it my life’s podcast’s work to bend the allusions in A Prayer… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 10: Isn’t It Pretty to Think So?
It’s uploaded! Another podcast here, in which Matt and I imagine backyard football versions of seven-a-side, two-way NFL players. In this brave new world, who’s running the triple option? Who’s actually going to have a pro-style offense with a quarterback who can play linebacker too? Are we still upset about actual NFL drafts from five… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 9: Phil Loadholt Throwing Marcus Mariota
Seeing Things Secondhand 