At the 96th Academy Awards, Diane Warren failed to win Best Original Song for the fifteenth time in fifteen tries. Shockingly, “The Fire Inside,” written for the movie about the guy who did not in fact come up with the idea for hot Cheetos, did not win. On the other hand, I’m willing to wager… Read More The Warren Index: Will They Win a Competitive Oscar Before Diane Warren?
February 20th One of the first pieces that Woodward and Bernstein try to get through in All the President’s Men is, on the whole, kind of thin. When Bradlee actually reads it, he tells them, “You haven’t got it,” says, “Not good enough.” The sell, delivered by Jack Warden’s Rosenfeld, initially described the piece to… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (2/20-3/1): A Rush of 2020s to the Head
For each movie in the top 100, I’ve written a question to answer. (It would get very, very boring for me to have to write some variation on “boy howdy, you’ll never believe how good this movie is” one hundred more times.) There’s no exact sentence or word count I’m holding myself to here, but… Read More Top 250 American Movies: 1-10
For each movie in the top 100, I’ve written a question to answer. (It would get very, very boring for me to have to write some variation on “boy howdy, you’ll never believe how good this movie is” one hundred more times.) There’s no exact sentence or word count I’m holding myself to here, but… Read More Top 250 American Movies: 41-50
Steven Hyden introduced his five-albums test more than a decade ago as a third way to judge a band, short of its popularity or its critical acclaim. While this one is not meant to stand on its own—for example, he’s not sure that either Bob Dylan nor the Rolling Stones had made five great albums… Read More The Five-Movies Test or: Which Director Has Had the Best Stretch of Consecutive Feature-Length Films in English?
With the Oscars around the corner, I’m doing blurbs for each of this year’s Best Picture nominees in lieu of full reviews. (I don’t plan anything I do, so I’ve linked to ones with reviews already published…) I’ve ranked the films from best to worst below as a method of organization. Occasionally I’ll reference my… Read More 94th Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees, Ranked
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. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Benny Safdie Spoilers! The plot is pretty far from twisty, but maybe you haven’t seen this and you’re looking forward to hearing the dialogue fresh or not knowing what classic music you’ll hear from the 1970s. At the risk of sounding like a stan or a… Read More Licorice Pizza (2021)
When Soggy Bottom is released sometime later this year, it will be Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth film in twenty-five years. Anderson, like another smart set favorite in Quentin Tarantino, is feted for a small filmic oeuvre indeed. If you want to replace Tarantino with David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, or even older directors like… Read More Paul Thomas Anderson Meta-Analysis
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
Seeing Things Secondhand 