Okay, this is the hyperspeed version of a movie diary. Two sentences! Each of you movies gets two sentences!
This one’s real late! A surprisingly busy schedule at work, the Oscars, and March Madness have all contributed. But it’s still really late! March 7th At least it was a good day for rewatches historically? Maybe Last Temptation, The Fugitive, and Badlands don’t make for the neatest triple feature in the world, but there are… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (3/7-3/16): Gamified Horror
March 2nd “Truly,” Sherif Ali says to Lawrence, “for some men nothing is written unless they write it.” It’s one of the most profound, haunting, and countermanded lines in cinematic history, and in a film which does not include any female characters, it’s noteworthy that the line refers only to “men.” Ala Kachuu adds “and… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (3/2-3/6): Benediction
February 20th One of the first pieces that Woodward and Bernstein try to get through in All the President’s Men is, on the whole, kind of thin. When Bradlee actually reads it, he tells them, “You haven’t got it,” says, “Not good enough.” The sell, delivered by Jack Warden’s Rosenfeld, initially described the piece to… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (2/20-3/1): A Rush of 2020s to the Head
February 15th I suppose if you compare virtually anything to Gunga Din or The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, it starts to look surprisingly nuanced about imperialism, but Wee Willie Winkie demands that we give the British Raj some side-eye from the very beginning. Priscilla does not immediately grasp the idea of what colonialism is,… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (2/15-2/19): The IQ of a Rabbit and the Faith of a Child
February 10th It’s not weird enough. It’s what I keep coming back to with this movie, which is daffy but not weird enough to register as something special. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are different enough for a trailer’s worth of gags, but over the course of the movie this is nothing more than a… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (2/10-2/14): Burning and Drowning and Pills, Oh My
February 5th What follows is a cursed description of a great movie. The screenwriting award at Sundance? Yuck! Charlie Kaufman loves this movie? Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! A two-hander where people bounce off each other awkwardly? Good God! But you oughtn’t to judge a movie by its little description on Criterion or Mubi any more than you… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (2/5-2/9): Three Thousand Yangs of Longing
January 31st This isn’t a movie I would have felt compelled to watch if not for the fact that it’s a Thais movie; it’s entirely possible that I would have been unable to resist “Dirty Gertie” as a phrase forever, so I don’t want to act like I never would have gotten to it. The… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (1/31-2/4): Time to Start Watching These Best Picture Nominees
January 26th Devdas does not have the structure, precisely, of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov, although the eponymous characters of both stories share an emotional bond. Despite having significant advantage in his society due to money, property, and the other niceties of a higher class, the men are unlucky with the objects of their first attraction and… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (1/26-1/30): The Vanquishing of the Witch Tim Burton
January 21st It’s too bad that I’m out of Ormond-Pirkle collaborations, because I was starting to develop a fondness for Pirkle’s sermons. They have a Homeric flavor to them, a use of Bible verses like epithets. Hector, breaker of horses has transformed over the centuries to Hell, where the worm does not die and the… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (1/21-1/25): Tsars, Commissars, and Pezidents
Seeing Things Secondhand 