Illuminated There’s been a decision made to not tune the CGI very much, I guess in the assumption that it won’t matter. The emphasis instead is on a lot of story in many episodic clusters, plus what passes for human interest in this demographic. There is some clever use of recalled Batman actors. A completely… Continue reading The Flash (2023)
Sherlock! (2010)
Logical Circularity This comment applies to the three, presumably the only three episodes of the BBC Sherlock! (The trend seems to be to modernise famed detectives and so denote with an exclamation point.) (After this comment was written, there would be more) I come to this as I come to any version of Sherlock because… Continue reading Sherlock! (2010)
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
Winning I shudder with the knowledge that in a few days, this grossed higher than any Pixar movie. Imagineer that. This about as charmless as it gets without the floor falling off, so I can only attribute the success to love of the character. As a non-gamer, I have no window into what this entails,… Continue reading The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
Tenet (2020)
Reflective Narrative You can draw a chart of what goes on in Nolan’s mind and how that instances in the worlds of cinema and the one I share. That chart would then be superimposed on a chart of timelines and events in this film. Nolan’s chart would trace an obsession with narrative reinterpretation plus cinematic… Continue reading Tenet (2020)
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Bad Influence This film marked a disastrous turn in American society. No, I’m not talking about the overtly racist content. Any nitwit can see that and adjust, though I suspect that my grandchildren will decry with equal vehemence the content of the films I now casually accept. The disaster that “Birth” brought was far more… Continue reading The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Birth (2004)
Operatic There’s a scene in this that will be a feature of film school classes for a long time to come. Nicole is an uneven actress, only sometimes rising to the world class of Kate and Cate and the young Julianne. The smallest part of this is the process of inhabiting a character, rare enough… Continue reading Birth (2004)
The Bird People in China (1998)
Purity, Song, Jade Miike has a pretty solid pattern. He makes films for a distinctly Japanese audience, teasing out some issue or two that seems culturally rooted. This is his context. He shifts it into a magical, cinematic world and imagines scenes as episodes within this containing structure. So we get impressed by the big… Continue reading The Bird People in China (1998)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
Inside the Lines In most respects, this is a conventional film. It has a lot of story, more than one dynamic development, and character portrayals way beyond the normal. Its conventionalism is also reflected in the father dynamic, pervasive these days, the social message of antiracism, and the standard final monster battle. A few jokes.… Continue reading Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Parasitic Nests I have a particular interest in five different cinematic styles, worlds actually. One of them I have named the Hispanic style. It is characterised by: elements of magical reality, either in supernatural physics or synchronous connections. a belief that the world is rich, fecund. Occasionally female sexuality is interwoven. Characters are both in… Continue reading Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Bingo (1991)
The American Spirit One of the strongest influences in how a society imagines itself is film, and of films the strongest are where the characters are most abstract. Abstraction can be through cartoons or cartoonizing, stereotyping or extreme dramatizing. But the most elegant to my mind is when everyday creatures or objects become the character.… Continue reading Bingo (1991)