Dir. Jon M. Chu. Starring Anthony Ramos, Melissa Barrera, Leslie Grace There’s a post-post-credits scene in In the Heights where Samuel L. Jackson comes out to ask Lin-Manuel Miranda if he wants to join the Avengers. But before that post-post-credits scene, there’s a regular post-credits scene where Piraguera (Miranda) takes advantage of a breakdown in… Read More In the Heights (2021)
Dir. Travis Wilkerson Another day, another documentary that is a better story than a film. Wilkerson is very much the central character in this documentary, more so than his great-grandfather, S.E. Branch, or the Black man who Branch murdered, Bill Spann. I suppose in any documentary where the filmmaker has this close a connection to… Read More Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017)
Yesterday afternoon, while cheerfully taking my zillionth Twitter constitutional, I found Katey Rich’s tweet in which she noted her involvement in an article for Vanity Fair which named, in the eyes of critics K. Austin Collins and Richard Lawson (and presumably some assists from the rest of VF’s movie staff), the twenty-five most influential movie… Read More Better than Vanity Fair’s 25 Most Influential Movie Scenes
This is the third piece of a three-part series. First up was a collation and analysis of forty critics’ rankings of Pixar movies, and then a quick digression into my own rankings. This third part is, in my eyes, the most fun. By bothering people I know, entreating people I know to bother people they… Read More Pixar Poll Results
If it’s possible to indifferent to Wes Anderson, then I am. When I’ve done this kind of work on other directors or brands, I’ve much more interested in the products either because there’s something about them that I find a kind of affront in, or because I really like them. Then again, “affront” is not… Read More Wes Anderson Meta-Analysis
Dir. Leigh Whannell. Starring Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Michael Dorman Metacritic’s compilation of year-end critics’ lists tells us that Time, Garrett Bradley’s documentary, ranks as the thirteenth most-noted film of the year. (They do some math, which you can read through for yourself.) The Invisible Man is fourteenth. I think it’s appropriate that both of… Read More The Invisible Man (2020)
Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring Josh Hartnett, Tom Sizemore, Sam Shepard One of the stupidest things anyone has ever said about war movies is that they’re all anti-war movies. This is Steven Spielberg’s interpretation, and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a popular one, there are definitely movies which are anti-something else which are frequently mistaken… Read More Black Hawk Down (2001)
Dir. Preston Sturges. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn One assumes that the phrase “head over heels” used to be the much more evocative “heels over head,” seeing as the one we’re using now describes most of us who are not circus performers. Not every strange pratfall which strikes Charlie Pike (Fonda) has him… Read More The Lady Eve (1941)
Dir. William Friedkin. Starring Kenneth Nelson, Cliff Gorman, Leonard Frey Watching this movie, I wondered as much as anything else how it could possibly be remade. Some of this stuff would never work as drama; there’s almost a timeless quality to how much the second act is aggressively forced in ways that will always fall… Read More The Boys in the Band (1970)
Dir. Alex Gibney Alex Gibney is one of the clubhouse leaders in documentaries that make you shake your head and/or your fist at the screen as you watch. His skill is in clarifying potentially difficult storylines, making the corporate or technical or financial jargon of his stories into simply understood narratives. In a different time,… Read More Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Seeing Things Secondhand 