Jenny Gage’s All This Panic is an invaluable DOCument (get it, because it’s a documentary?!) of modern teenage life, made all the more essential by how rarely Hollywood accurately depicts these pivotal years.
Category: Remember All the Movies, Terry, We’d Go See
DAVID LYNCH: THE ART LIFE (Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm)
In David Lynch: The Art Life, the heralded title director relays intimate psychological stories from his early life and painting career that must have inspired his films, but their relationship to each other is presented merely implicitly as opposed to sufficiently explicitly.
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COLOSSAL & THE LOVERS: Lies in Advertising
The respective relationships between the misleading trailers and actual movies for Nacho Vigalondo’s painfully perplexing Colossal and Azazel Jacobs’s fascinatingly perplexing The Lovers exemplify two types of flicks that spawn false advertising, both for the same predictable reason: commercial appeal.
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WAR DOGS (Todd Phillips): Perverting the American Dream
At a time when a former (some would say current) entertainer has become the official Presidential face of one of the most powerful countries in the world, a movie – that most classic of American entertainment – from last year now feels like a harbinger of Donald Trump’s America. Though the script was written well before the batshit craziness otherwise known as the election of 2016, Todd Phillips’ War Dogs offers up perverse depictions of not only Trumpian figures but also the paradoxical aspects of American culture – specifically the mythological tradition of the American Dream – that have allowed for such megalomaniacs of excess to attain success in this country.
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A Weekend in the Cinema: GOING IN STYLE
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.
Stage It Like You Dream It
A new week, a new screen-to-stage idea.
An Ode to Asghar Farhadi
After seeing Asghar Farhadi’s Academy Award-winning The Salesman earlier this year, I posted the following tweetstorm on Twitter:
Why – in 300 Words – THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE, LIGHTS OUT, and Many Other Horror Flicks Should’ve Just…Come to Broadway?! (or Off, or Off-Off, or Off-Off-Off, etc. ad infinitum)
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.
A Weekend in the Cinema: KONG: SKULL ISLAND (and more on LOGAN)
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.
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A Weekend in the Cinema: LOGAN; TABLE 19; BEFORE I FALL; THE SHACK (kind of)
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…
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