Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer. Starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Edmund MacDonald Maybe I’m too online to live, but at the moment where Vera (Savage) tells Al (Neal) that he’s trying to “buck Fate,” I couldn’t help but find the spoonerism. This is, amusingly enough, pretty darn close to the twin problems that men have in… Read More Detour (1945)
Dir. Peter Farrelly. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini Mahershala Ali won his second Academy Award for playing Don Shirley in this movie, and it’s an extremely endearing performance. He exemplifies “trim” in this picture, from his beautiful clothes to his neat facial hair to his spotless elocution. Watching someone who has every inch… Read More Green Book (2018)
Dir. David Yates. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson Hogwarts deserves better than the ending it’s given. In the book as well, the Battle of Hogwarts is a sort of crumpled, bloodstained love letter to the school where the majority of this story has taken place. In some ways that’s even more true in… Read More Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)
Directed by David Yates. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint I’m sure the conversation didn’t happen just this way, but at some point the director, the producers, the writer, and so on must have sat down and said: “Part 1 is going to do all the work and Part 2 is going to be all payoff.”… Read More Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010)
Dir. Mike Newell. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint The Potter books total over a million words. The movies come to nearly twenty hours. There are any number of scenes that must have been difficult to adapt for myriad reasons, but the absolute most difficult scene to turn from words to images is the… Read More Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
Dir. Herbert Ross. Starring Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton Whaddaya like? You like coming home to a kiss? Somebody with a smile at the door? Whaddaya like? You like indescribable bliss? Then whaddaya wanna get married for? Just as Company makes sense in the New York City of the late ’60s, Steel Magnolias makes sense in… Read More Steel Magnolias (1989)
Dir. Ron Howard, sort of. Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, Joonas Suotamo The biggest problem with Solo is everything that happens after the gang gets to Savareen. The secondary villains, who wear all sorts of interesting helmets, take off their interesting helmets and reveal that they are good guys after all. There’s another melee fight… Read More Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
Dir. Kelly Fremon Craig. Starring Hailee Steinfeld, Blake Jenner, Kyra Sedgwick When Nadine (Steinfeld) is at a particularly low point, she launches herself into her more or less sympathetic history teacher’s classroom and launches into a string of word vomit. The movie wants to play some of it offhandedly, such as Nadine’s offering Mr. Bruner… Read More The Edge of Seventeen (2016)
Dir. Noah Baumbach. Starring Ben Stiller, Adam Driver, Naomi Watts Would-be documentarian Josh (Stiller) is full of it, which I think we all could have learned from the trailer, but there are two scenes which prove that even from a filmmaking perspective he’s lost his grip. The second scene is for his sheer pretension; over… Read More While We’re Young (2015)
Dir. David Frankel. Starring Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt “I wouldn’t care if you were pole dancing all night as long as you did it with a little integrity,” Nate (Adrian Grenier) tells Andy (Hathaway) one evening. It’s an interesting line—one that immediately follows a quip about how the guy who makes “port wine… Read More The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Seeing Things Secondhand 