Category: 2023 Movie Diary

Movie Diary 2023 (7/1-7/5): Please Stop Making Me Watch Clips from High Society

July 1st Pompeii (2014, dir. Paul W.S. Anderson) Soylent Green (1973, dir. Richard Fleischer) The place I want to start with Pompeii is its budget, because it’s a blockbuster/spectacle movie and, cynically, I have a hard time starting anywhere else with those. The numbers vary, but let’s call it $90 million in 2014 dollars. My… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (7/1-7/5): Please Stop Making Me Watch Clips from High Society

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Movie Diary 2023 (6/1-6/30): Great Caesar’s Ghost I Still Have a Lot of These Left

Okay, two sentences each, let’s make this happen, ready, hike. Force of Evil, 1948, dir. Abraham Polonsky / America’s commitment to leftist filmmaking runs shallower than you’d find in many other countries, but that’s not Polonsky’s fault. His first feature (made not long before he was blacklisted) puts everyman John Garfield in a decent suit,… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (6/1-6/30): Great Caesar’s Ghost I Still Have a Lot of These Left

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Movie Diary 2023 (3/17-4/5): That Time I Got Really Into a Different Project and Realized That I’d Deserted a Perfectly Good Bit and Needed to Get Back to It

Okay, this is the hyperspeed version of a movie diary. Two sentences! Each of you movies gets two sentences! The Chosen, 1981, dir. Jeremy Kagan / Adored this movie based on the Chaim Potok novel I’ve never read and now realize I must read, given how closely this adheres to Brideshead Revisited and especially A… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (3/17-4/5): That Time I Got Really Into a Different Project and Realized That I’d Deserted a Perfectly Good Bit and Needed to Get Back to It

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2023 Movie Diary (2/15-2/19): The IQ of a Rabbit and the Faith of a Child

February 15th Wee Willie Winkie / 1937, dir. John Ford 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… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (2/15-2/19): The IQ of a Rabbit and the Faith of a Child

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2023 Movie Diary (2/10-2/14): Burning and Drowning and Pills, Oh My

February 10th Twins / 1988, dir. Ivan Reitman 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… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (2/10-2/14): Burning and Drowning and Pills, Oh My

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2023 Movie Diary (2/5-2/9): Three Thousand Yangs of Longing

February 5th What Happened Was… / 1994, dir. Tom Noonan Wavelength / 1967, dir. Michael Snow Tartuffe / 1926, dir. F.W. Murnau 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… Read More 2023 Movie Diary (2/5-2/9): Three Thousand Yangs of Longing

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