In the latest edition of our conversations, Matt and I bring friend and former roommate of the podcast Josh aboard to talk about my recently completed “Better than the Oscars” project. We did chat about it, though we predictably spread the conversation a little wider than my ranking and write-ups. What follows is a lightly… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #7: Better than the Oscars Recap and Discussion
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 1
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 5-2
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 10-6
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 15-11
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 20-16
Content warning – Ingmar Bergman’s films frequently deal with mature issues concerning sexuality, cruelty, or both. Many significant spoilers below, in case you are a budding Bergman fan and don’t want to know. In fairness, all of the movies noted below are at the very least thirty-six years old. It’s not every day one’s favorite… Read More Seven Sevens: The Ingmar Bergman Centennial
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson There may not be an actor whose star persona has interested me more in the past eighteen months than Max von Sydow’s. (I admit to a limited understanding of his Scandinavian film career outside of Bergman and Jan Troell, so I’m not going to… Read More The Passion of Anna (1969)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin, Jorgen Lindstrom What’s particularly interesting about Bergman’s so-called “Trilogy of Faith,” which concludes with this picture and is preceded by Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light, is that each one throws us into unfamiliar territory without giving us very much in advance. In the first, we… Read More The Silence (1963)
Dir. Anthony Asquith. Starring Michael Redgrave, Nigel Patrick, Brian Smith There are so few good movies about teachers in the world because actual teachers’ professional lives don’t lend themselves well to typical movie drama. Thus movies about teachers frequently thrust them into situations where they take on “unteachable” students and, with some post-hard knocks empathy,… Read More The Browning Version (1951)
Seeing Things Secondhand 