Dir. Robert Altman. Starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman One could sit around with a couple cocktails and some jazz in the background and have a very pleasant debate about which genre the swell matters more in. Does the swell matter more in drama, where a series of events pile on top of one… Read More M*A*S*H (1970)
Dir. Vince Marcello. Starring Joey King, Jacob Elordi, Joel Courtney Like most of its constituent pieces, The Kissing Booth is primarily interesting because of where we’ve seen it somewhere else before. It’s the 21st Century in this film, but I can hardly remember anyone even looking at a cell phone, let alone getting into the… Read More The Kissing Booth (2018)
Dir. Denis Villeneuve. Starring Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Sharon Duncan-Brewster Spoilers follow. I mean, there’s not that much that happens in this sucker, but it’s a recent release, so…spoilers. Friends, Prestige television has been affected by a powerful and terrible scourge in the years since I gave up on it. Presumably guided by the perspective… Read More Dune (2021)
Dir. George Waggner. Starring Lon Chaney, Jr., Claude Rains, Evelyn Ankers Dir. William F. Claxton. Starring Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun Both of these pictures—one a classic horror movie from Universal and the other a marvelously terrible horror movie that made me go “Aw!” for ninety minutes—begin with scientific invocations. In 1941, one goes… Read More The Wolf Man (1941) and Night of the Lepus (1972)
Dir. Bryan Forbes. Starring Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough, Gerald Sim For so much of this film, less is more. In one of the film’s early sequences, Myra (Stanley) is revealing the remade child’s bedroom to her husband, Billy (Attenborough). It’s been redone to look like a hospital room, which Billy guesses at; Myra is dead… Read More Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)
Dir. John Huston. Starring Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Leo Genn It’s easier for me at least to identify single choices in form, structure, performance, and so on which torpedo a movie rather than elevate it. In Moby Dick, there’s an all-timer of a decision which elevates the movie to mysterious heights, and that is the… Read More Moby Dick (1956)
Dir. Chris Charles Scott and Seth Porges Directors of documentaries frequently look for ways to make sure that their words reinforce the images they’ve chosen for the screen, whether it’s by writing a narration or appearing in front of the camera. If you’re Michael Moore, at the far end of both qualities for intrusiveness, it… Read More Class Action Park (2020)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Sarah Miles, Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard There’s a scene in Madeleine, made two decades earlier and under a radically different set of censorship instructions, where a sex scene is replaced, essentially, with a torrid reel. Rather than depicting a coital sequence between Ann Todd and Ivan Desny which wouldn’t have passed… Read More Ryan’s Daughter (1970)
Dir. Edmund Goulding. Starring Tyrone Power, Coleen Gray, Joan Blondell Everyone has a few quotes that rattle around in their brains in perpetuity for no good reason at all. Here’s one of mine: Gillis: They’re pretty hot for it over at Twentieth, but I think Zanuck’s all wet. Can you see Ty Power as a… Read More Nightmare Alley (1947)
Dir. Ema Ryan Yamazaki There are more than 350 Division I men’s basketball programs in the United States. The 68-team March Madness tournament remains one of the great unifiers of offices across the nation, as even casual observers get pushed into pools to submit their brackets. Its randomness is its calling card, and for three… Read More Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams (2019)
Seeing Things Secondhand 