Dir. Jim Henson. Starring the Muppets, Diana Rigg, Charles Grodin My ten favorite gags in The Great Muppet Caper, which has been one of my favorite movies since the mid-1990s. (I’ll save you some suspense. “What color are their hands now?” is not going to make this list.) 10) No respect for the British Society… Read More The Great Muppet Caper (1981)
Dir. Fred Schepisi. Starring Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah, Shelley Duvall I’ve been watching this movie for, oh, fifteen years or so now, but it’s taken me until this most recent viewing to see what Fred Schepisi saw when he was making this movie. (Maybe I was dazzled by the pitch-perfect ’80s theme by Bruce Smeaton,… Read More Roxanne (1987)
Dir. Joan Micklin Silver. Starring Amy Irving, Peter Riegert, Reizl Bozyk There are more romantic movies set in New York City than there are total movies set in Idaho, but the New York of these movies is so often a basically nonspecific one. To choose one (that I like!) at random, Set It Up is a perfectly… Read More Crossing Delancey (1988)
Dir. Milos Forman. Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge There are two kinds of people in the world (here it comes): the people who need validation and people who don’t. It’s not merely that Salieri (Abraham) and Mozart (Hulce) are both the first type in a job where that external validation is all… Read More Amadeus (1984)
Dir. Michael Curtiz. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains Sometimes, when I feel just aggressively masochistic, I try to narrow down the best scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. This is a fool’s errand, and only fools rush in. On the other hand, I’ve seen Casablanca maybe a dozen times in my life, and I… Read More Casablanca (1943)
Dir. Sam Weisman. Starring Brendan Fraser, Leslie Mann, John Cleese A beautiful young heiress, stuck in an engagement with a man she doesn’t seem to like very much, goes on a trip in which her fiance’s venality comes to the fore as a new suitor slouches in. This new man charms her, even though he’s… Read More George of the Jungle (1997)
Dir. John Carpenter. Starring Karen Allen, Jeff Bridges, Charles Martin Smith What separates grief from its lesser emotional cousins is how total it is, how difficult it is to shake, how nearly it stalks. In a film filled with gorgeous moments, the one that stands out most to me takes place in a truck stop… Read More Starman (1984)
Dir. Robert Eggers. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie The real tension, the real horror in The Witch isn’t in the story. This is not a scary movie, despite the genre it belongs to on Netflix or at your local video store (as if!). The tension comes from wondering when Eggers is going to… Read More The Witch (2015)
Dir. Rob Reiner. Starring Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin William Goldman could not have chosen a more difficult kind of story to write than this bifocals fairy tale. Looking at it through the top half of the lens, this is a once upon a time story about adventure and magic and a princess in… Read More The Princess Bride (1987)
Tim: We begin this at 2:30 a.m. to bring the True-True to You-You.. (I want it said that Matt has edited “you all” to You-You, so that’s auspicious.) Matt: I am the Author (like Rowling) Tim: Both of us are avowed Cloud Atlas fans, both the movie and the really exceptional book it’s based on,… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #15: Cloud Atlas
Seeing Things Secondhand 