Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. Starring William Powell, Luise Rainer, Frank Morgan Before we start, I want to make clear that I am not “motivation Internet guy.” I don’t think everyone in a movie needs to be obviously motivated by something, least of all villains. (Who thinks Anton Chigurh needs a motivation? Or Old Man Clanton?)… Read More The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet In the moment, Contagion is a rush. This is one of the virtues of its structure, one of the late legacies of the aughts fascination with multiple loosely connected story strands. (It’s like everyone in Hollywood watched Nashville on the same weekend in 1998 and spent the… Read More Contagion (2011)
Dir. Jon Turteltaub. Starring Nicolas Cage, Justin Bartha, Diane Kruger Could anyone else besides Nicolas Cage have pulled this kind of movie off? There’s no one who I think we, as a society, expect this kind of tightrope walking from. This guy has an Oscar, which I forget about all the time, in much the… Read More National Treasure (2004)
Dir. Billy Wilder. Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray In writing about The Apartment in the past (once as a great American movie, and the other as a Best Picture winner), I find myself coming back to the movie’s cynical heart, the seediness which is totally unexceptional to its purveyors, and all the more real for… Read More The Apartment (1960)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Barely a movie in the traditional sense, A Visitor from the Living has two flourishes which make it more than a taped interview. The first are some shots of Theresienstadt, very much in the style that Lanzmann had used in Shoah. The buildings in the contemporary present are seen while we hear the words of… Read More A Visitor from the Living (1997)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Zeva Postic edited Shoah, and it’s a heroic job. Not simply because there was so much to go through, and not simply because there was so much to finally get on the screen. It’s because she highlights the strands of Lanzmann’s inquiry so cleanly, an absolute necessity for a film with this one’s… Read More Shoah (1985)
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones There’s a compulsion to see No Country as a sort of relentlessly nihilistic story, and I smell what those people are stepping in. There is an awful lot of collateral damage in this picture, well beyond the people who enter a dangerous line of… Read More No Country for Old Men (2007)
Dir. Jane Campion. Starring Nicole Kidman, Martin Donovan, John Malkovich The words don’t matter in this movie. I find that pleasingly ironic, given Henry James’ reputation as a stylist, but it’s more than just irony that makes the effacing of language so interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a traditional narrative feature where the… Read More The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
Dir. Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton The original plan was to do an unlikely moving pairing post which put this in conversation with Gunga Din, sort of a commentary on the resounding popularity of moderately racist entertainment. And then I actually watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a movie which is significantly more… Read More Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Dir. Lars von Trier. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland There’s a shot in Melancholia where I felt like waving at the screen and calling Justine (Dunst) companero, as if I were Peter Falk in Wings of Desire. I understood Justine entirely. It’s when she’s sitting on top of a stack of chairs in her wedding dress as… Read More Melancholia (2011)
Seeing Things Secondhand 