One of a critic’s imperative responsibilities is to retain some form of objectivity in their analyses. Subjective taste will of course always partially influence opinion, but those tasked with critiquing for the benefit of the general public should strive to value that which can be justified—or at the very least explained—to others in their proclaimed judgements.
A new week, a new screen-to-stage idea.
After seeing Asghar Farhadi’s Academy Award-winning The Salesman earlier this year, I posted the following tweetstorm on Twitter:
Add last year’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Lights Out to the long list of excessively derivative, and thus increasingly tired horror movies that would be better suited for the stage.
Kong: Skull Island shares traits with both of the last two weekends’ slates of releases: like Get Out two weeks ago, it’s basically the sole offering of interest this weekend; and like last weekend – but unlike Get Out, unfortunately – this lone offering did not offer moviegoers much of a reason to leave their houses to hit the local cinema.
Continue reading “A Weekend in the Cinema: KONG: SKULL ISLAND (and more on LOGAN)”
For much of my life, I’ve made a concerted effort to see wide release movies in their opening weekends. Though rival studios only really focus on one element when choosing release dates – $$$$$ – unintentional connections can still be forced made between the flicks because most contemporaneous art tends to comment on shared factors intrinsic to the time and environment in which they’re produced. As such, I shall attempt to explore these ideas – BRIEFLY, I swear – every Monday through the lens of the weekend’s slate after having the opportunity to see them all (within reason). Due to their different release dates from city to city, independent films will be excluded from this series, which I’m dubbing “A Weekend in the Cinema” (STEPHEN SONDHEIM/A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC REFERENCE ALERT!!!). Without further ado…
All three (or I guess four) of March 3rd’s wide releases suffer from flawed screenplays that fail to transcend the more artistically restrictive conventions of their chosen genres. Logan is the biggest and also probably the best, less a testament to its (disappointing) quality and more a reflection of the overwhelming turpitude of these offerings…
Continue reading “A Weekend in the Cinema: LOGAN; TABLE 19; BEFORE I FALL; THE SHACK (kind of)”
THIS WEEK’S LINEUP
Dying Laughing (Lloyd Stanton / Paul Toogood) / The Last Laugh (Ferne Pearlstein)
Catfight (Onur Turkel) / Fist Fight (Richie Keen)
The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy)
I Am Michael (Justin Kelly)
The Last Word (Mark Pellington)
My Scientology Movie (John Dower)
Song to Song (Terrence Malick)
Wolves (Bart Freundlich)
Continue reading “Movie Roundup 3/3-22 (Tweet-of-Consciousness)”
First, read the pictured excerpt from this article about Netflix’s CEO’s continued war vs the movieGOING experience: https://t.co/mIcOWWSgHE pic.twitter.com/vy2n2KmpHl
— Steven Strauss (@aintnohero) March 18, 2017
Continue reading “The Means Are the Message (Tweet-of-Consciousness)”
After looking at the slate of wide releases for this past weekend, I initially decided to skip my recently launched “A Weekend in the Cinema” series out of a sheer lack of desire to see more than one of the movies (no offense to Collide and Rock Dog – an animated flick literally about a rock-and-roll playing dog – but like, nah b)…that is, until I actually saw the sole offering of interest, Get Out.
THIS WEEK’S LINEUP
A United Kingdom (Amma Asante)
Alone in Berlin (Vincent Perez)
American Honey (Andrea Arnold)
Fences (Denzel Washington) / It’s Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan)
The Founder (John Lee Hancock)
John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski)
Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back (Hark Tsui)
Kedi (Ceyda Torun)
Keep Quiet (Sam Blair / Joseph Martin)
La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska)
Moana (too many to list, so I’ll just go with: Disney)
Mr. Gaga (Tomey Heymann)
My Life As A Zucchini (Claude Barras)
Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (Olivier Ducastel / Jacques Martineau)
The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit)
The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi)
Split (M. Night Shyamalan)
Write All Nite 