Ten Sentence Movie Reviews and Other Mussings
The best time and light for film biographies is twilight. Everything old looks grand in the dying light and creeping shadows, and it hardly matters that the actorly imitation is a step or two behind the genuine article. At that age everything is reflection, memory, regret and sadness, hopes of resurrecting those youthful steps and…
Read More "Stan & Ollie: Finds the Sad Truth After the Visual Gag Has Shined"
If art is truly to be unique and great then it can’t be easily reproducible. If every frame of At Eternity’s Gate, a film about Vincent Van Gough directed by Julian Schnabel, is striving to be a reproduction of VVG’s art, a ray of inspiration on his vision, art, and process than it negates the…
Read More "“At Eternity’s Gate”: Too Much Van Gogh Ruins the Art"
Border is a caveman fairy tale, a love story about chromosomes gone wrong, a metaphor about how man can rise and fall to his simian origins. It never settles into an evolution of its own, always evolving into different passions, weirder ideas, tilting to sci-fi one moment, reality the next, always skirting the tragedy-happiness of…
Read More "“Border”: Rising Above the Tragedy of Chromosomes"
Burning refers to both physical and inner emotional fires. The Korean director Lee Chang-Dong delights in taking his movie, an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story, right up to the edge of borders physical (the blare of a North Korean propaganda broadcast drifts over frequently); emotional-- between friendship and betrayal, love and jealousy; and mysterious--…
Read More "“Burning”: Lee Chang-Dong Searches for the Fiery Great Hunger of Existence"
Hirokazu Kore-Eda Shoplifters has the economy and emotional power of a Haiku. Scenes run the exact length they need to be. There is not an extra syllable, an extra frame, an extra color or ray of light, no unneeded image, extra emotions, not a drop of overdrawn characters. Shoplifters is a true masterpiece of precision…
Read More "“Shoplifters”: Kore-Eda’s Great Haiku of Family and Light"
In They Shall Not Grow Old, a WWI documentary directed by Peter Jackson to commemorate its 100 year end, it’s the work a day attitude of the British soldiers as archived on BBC audio records that stands out. For most of them it was a job; albeit it a grinding terrible one filled with blood,…
Read More "“They Shall Not Grow Old”: Digging Into The Grit, The Horror of WWI"
In We the Animals, Jonah’s (Evan Rosado) words in his journal are blurred while the overlaid furiously scribbled art is vividly animated. The director Jeremiah Zagar is showing the congealing of a young artistic mind and vision defining its place in the world. That world is defined and trickles in impressionistically as he tries to…
Read More "“We the Animals”: Portrait of the Wild Young Artist"
In the real courtroom Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murdering her parents but in the court of public opinion and mythic imagination she would be forever adjudged guilty, even honored for it with the infamous 40 whack nursery rhyme. In film she would be the maddest of axe murderers with bad parenting being the grisly…
Read More "“Lizzie”: Gets to the Lessie Behind the Whack Job"
Ruth Bader Ginsberg is having a good year on film with the release of the documentary RBG and now On the Basis of Sex, the story of her first big court victory for equal rights. Rarely does one get the truth and the fiction of their life as bookends for public consumption. On the Basis…
Read More "“On the Basis of Sex”: RBG Gets Her SCOTUS Vibe Going"
