Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich Watching Hail, Caesar! with the knowledge that the Coens’ next movie is The Ballad of Buster Scruggs makes Caesar look better, a kind of “learning to walk before you can run” aspect. In Buster Scruggs, which is pure anthology, there is no central character to whom everyone is tied, functioning… Read More Hail, Caesar! (2016)
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)
The Luminaries is an enormously enjoyable novel, with emphasis on the adverb. At more than eight hundred pages, it is the longest novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, and its author, Eleanor Catton, is the youngest to ever win the Man Booker. (She was twenty-eight when it was published, which makes me wish I… Read More Casting The Luminaries for TV: Utter, Wishful, and Shameful Fanfiction
Seeing Things Secondhand 