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)
Dir. David Hand. Starring Paula Winslowe, Bobby Stewart, Peter Behn Dir. Edgar Wright. Starring Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Kevin Spacey The gentle young man who loses the mother who protected him and raised him is a common enough trope, but what makes Bambi and Baby stand out is that they have the dumbest names of… Read More Bambi (1942) and Baby Driver (2017)
Dir. Spike Lee. Starring John David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace BlacKkKlansman begins with the famous crane shot from Gone with the Wind, where Scarlett, desperate to pass off the responsibility for delivering Melanie’s baby, looks for Dr. Meade. It pulls further and further and further away from what must be hundreds of men lying… Read More BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Dir. Krzystof Kieslowski. Starring Juliette Binoche, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Irene Jacob Not since I wrote about Persona about eighteen months ago have I felt so reluctant to commit to what I think about a movie (or, indeed, three of them). Kieslowski died in 1996 and never lived to see the new millennium or the way the… Read More Three Colors Trilogy: Blue (1993), White (1994), Red (1994)
Tim: Matt has an entertaining question to lead us off with today for our discussion of reboots. Matt: Are these Conversations a reboot of the podcast? Tim: Here we are, living in our own little rebooted nightmare where we can no longer just say things, but where we must type all of our thoughts instead.… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #9: Reboots
Dir. Bob Fosse. Starring Shirley MacLaine, John McMartin, Chita Rivera Usually it is a death sentence for a movie if its best scenes don’t really include its major character or have anything to do with its plot. Sweet Charity doesn’t deserve the chair, though; if it were a person it would have been released already for time… Read More Sweet Charity (1969)
Dir. Ron Mann There’s nothing remotely Altmanesque about Altman, which, given the practically fetishistic load the movie hangs on the word, seems disappointing. (One wants to like the presence of past Altman collaborators giving definitions to the word, as I know I did when Michael Murphy went first. It was when I realized Michael Murphy wasn’t… Read More Altman (2014)
Seeing Things Secondhand 