Dir. Mike Judge. Starring Ron Livingston, David Herman, Ajay Naidu Since watching Office Space for the first time, I’ve struggled to come up with a way to describe just how bad it is. The story of a bunch of nobodies being nobodies at their nothing jobs, intended as a color-by-numbers for beta males, is so terrifically dumb… Read More Office Space (1999)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Brenda De Banzie, Charles Laughton, John Mills David Lean plays two tricks on us in the first two minutes or so of Hobson’s Choice. The first has to do with the shoes. Hobson’s is a shop for boots, shoes, and clogs, proclaims the sign, and in a tracking shot we see… Read More Hobson’s Choice (1954)
Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske. Starring Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Verna Felton The story of Alice is one of the most frequently visited in English-language cinema, and the problem of how to represent the immense strangeness of her Wonderland is just about as vexing. How does one adequately represent the world beyond the… Read More Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Dir. Alfonso Cuaron. Starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris The Blue Marble, probably taken by Jack Schmitt aboard Apollo 17, has had a profound effect on the many millions of people who viewed it. Carl Sagan, twenty-odd years later, saw Earth from even farther away in the Pale Blue Dot. Everything you have ever… Read More Gravity (2013)
Dir. George Scribner. Starring Joey Lawrence, Dom DeLuise, Billy Joel The first five minutes of Oliver & Company are indebted to the opening minutes of two of its predecessors. Eleven years earlier, The Rescuers used still images of a message in a bottle, sometimes enduring a storm and sometimes reaching a pier in warm yellow… Read More Oliver and Company (1988)
Dir. Penny Marshall. Starring Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Perkins, Jared Rushton Over the course of a year, three separate comedies put women at the upper echelons of late ’80s business and simultaneously ensnared them in love triangles. The world of business and work entwine each other until there is no clear separation between the profitable and… Read More Big (1988)
Dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin. In 1949, Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway, which on its most basic level is about a salesman who is too old and tired to go on the road any longer. The beginning of the play hints at Willy Loman’s exhaustion through that benighted car: Willy: I got… Read More Salesman (1969)
Dir. Ted Berman and Richard Rich. Starring Grant Bardsley, Nigel Hawthorne, Susan Sheridan I really wanted to like The Black Cauldron, which has a reputation as the bête noire of Disney at its lowest point of the 20th Century. As ever with Disney, that’s a low point concerning profits, not quality. From 1977 to 1986,… Read More The Black Cauldron (1985)
Dir. Mike Newell. Starring Lily James, Michiel Huisman, Katherine Parkinson The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will, I hope, go down in history as the Saving Private Ryan of period romantic dramas. What both movies share is a tremendous sense that you should feel something and a complete inability to actually give us… Read More The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
Dir. Michael Curtiz. Starring James Cagney, Joan Leslie, Walter Huston Perhaps some foolish moron will endeavor to create a little canon of “the most Hollywood movies” of all time. (I hear some of you saying that the AFI lists are such a canon already, and that said moron need not exert much effort on his… Read More Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Seeing Things Secondhand 