Before Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President David Rubin passed the baton to Tracee Ellis Ross and Leslie Jordan to announce the Oscar nominees yesterday morning, he said something that caught my attention more than any nomination did. He said there were nearly 9,500 voting members of the Academy. First of all, 9,500… Read More Return to Five Best Picture Nominees
Another year of Oscar nominations, another year where I can’t do this as it’s happening because no one pays me to do this at my day job. So it goes. Thank you for reading me anyway! 1) The Power of the Dog is the front-runner for Best Picture, full stop. Many of your favorite movie… Read More 94th Academy Awards Nominations: Hastily Scribbled Thoughts
Dir. Rodney Ascher I refer back to this moment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a lot, partly because it’s funny and mostly because it’s useful. Harry has just given an interview to The Quibbler about the return of Voldemort, and it’s selling like hotcakes and creating a fair amount of mail… Read More A Glitch in the Matrix (2021)
The part of this song that everyone likes best is the “What can you do/What can you DOOOOOOO,” which is pure vocal catnip. We’re supposed to like it. It’s in there as enjoyable punctuation in a number which is not shy about throwing chest voice belting in with rapid enunciation. In the Raul Esparza interpretation… Read More “30/90,” from tick…tick…BOOM!
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong If Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and Stephen Gaghan were making hyperlink cinema in the years preceding Zero Dark Thirty, then what Bigelow and writer Mark Boal are making is more like citation cinema. There’s a fascination with phrases which become title cards, such as “black site”… Read More Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Dir. Chloe Zhao. Starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Brian Tyree Henry Eternals is not good. It’s so not-good that I actually have a hard time knowing where to start with the not-goodness of it, a problem that typically reminds me of that whiny Rise of Skywalker review that I wrote a couple years ago. It’s… Read More Eternals (2021)
Dir. Caroline Laskow and Ian Rosenberg I’d basically given up on Welcome to Kutsher’s long before hitting the forty-five minute mark of the film. This is a short documentary, barely seventy minutes long, and it’s pretty clear that it’s being stretched to the brink long before then. Welcome to Kutsher’s is made for people who… Read More Welcome to Kutsher’s: The Last Catskills Resort (2012)
I have not seen Spider-Man: No Way Home. I do not know what happens in the movie outside of anything they show in a trailer. My guess is that I will not see No Way Home until it comes to my streaming or to my local library. All I know is that this movie has… Read More What We Talk About When We Talk About the Spider-Man: No Way Home Oscar Campaign
Dir. Kurt Kuenne This is a genuinely unusual film, even though much of its trappings are pretty typical for a documentary. Talking heads, personal reminiscences, home videos, police reports, news clippings, all that stuff. It begins as the story of Andrew Bagby, a recent medical school graduate who was murdered by an ex-girlfriend named Shirley… Read More Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)
Dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky As a damn Yankee—a Yankee merely visits the South but a damn Yankee stays—I have been occasionally amazed at the inability of even highly educated Southerners to name what states make up New England and which ones they are. And as a person who was born and raised in… Read More Brother’s Keeper (1992)
Seeing Things Secondhand 