Every year, I track all the major off-Broadway theatre company’s seasons to determine whose deserves to be crowned the best of, currently, 2017-2018. It’s still too early to declare a winner, but based on its three revivals this fall, the Signature Theatre looks like the odds-on favorites.
Continue reading “JESUS HOPPED THE ‘A’ TRAIN (Signature Theatre)”
Tony Kushner once likened a complex play to a lasagna. Much like an Italian-minded chef, a writer should try to stuff as many different ingredients as possible into their constructions to expansively deepen the flavor, yet not too many as to make the overall structure tumble under its own excessive weight – a tenuous balancing act that requires precise hands to create such complicated concoctions.
Continue reading “SUBURBICON: When Someone Other Than the Coen Brothers Makes a Coen Brothers Movie”
I voraciously seek out any and all innovatively-designed animated movies, especially those that deviate as much as possible from the customary 3-D block-graphics popularized by Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, Sony, etc. Given the inextricable relationship between content and form, if artists change the form that these stories take, it will open up vastly different worlds of content, desperately needed in the increasingly-tired animated sector (as I previously detailed here).
Continue reading “LOVING VINCENT: Loving the Animation, Not-Loving Everything Else”
The LEGO Ninjago Movie lacks the crucial comedic focuses of the first two installments in this quickly-expanding series.
Continue reading “THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE (Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher, Bob Logan)”
While watching 1973’s The Last Detail in preparation for Richard Linklater’s impending sequel Last Flag Flying, I realized that no one really makes FILMS like Hal Ashby anymore, which is surprising given our current age of relentless derivativeness (at best, “homage”). It’s undeniably a testament to the distinctness of Ashby’s work on multiple fronts:
Continue reading “THE LAST DETAIL (1973), and a Hal Ashby Requiem”
What was the last sports movie that completely failed to capture the cinematic dynamism of the sport?
Continue reading “BATTLE OF THE SEXES (Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris)”
Documentary filmmaking possesses a high floor in regards to the consistent quality of even its weakest offerings, largely because the subjects are almost always compelling enough to justify a feature-length examination. And yet, the genre simultaneously suffers from perhaps the most monotonous output as well due to most utilizing the same-old aesthetics.
Continue reading “Marvelous Documentaries vs. Marvel-ish Documentaries”
Mark Harris’ Five Came Back is one of the best books ever written about the film industry. Unfortunately, the conventional Netflix documentary adapted from it bears none of the formal inventiveness so integral to the success of the source material.
Ever since O.J.: Made in America won the Oscar for Best Documentary earlier this year, I’ve been contemplating whether it should’ve even been eligible.
Comparing 2005’s Wolf Creek (the movie; not the newer TV adaptation) to the recently released Killing Ground acts as a sort of Australian lens through which to examine just how much the horror genre’s relationship to gruesome violence has changed over the last decade.
Continue reading “KILLING GROUND, WOLF CREEK, & the Current State of Torture Porn”
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