Some Dusty Pig The first Mad Max had a few strong attractions. It was overtly Australian in a few dimensions which hit a niche of the familiar exotic. It was pure science fiction in that it abstracted our world into a future where only the tiniest fragment of what we know was carried over and… Continue reading Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Category: IMDB Comments
Comments made for the Internet Movie Database
In The Night Garden (2007-2009)
Inception There seems to be quite a consensus that this doesn’t have any educational value. Such a stance presumes that kids need explicit teaching and preaching. Either you need to include an alphabet in your song like Sesame Street or have some obvious moral conclusion. How silly. Kids learn by what they see of how… Continue reading In The Night Garden (2007-2009)
Visual Acoustics (2008)
Speaking Space Here’s more about the challenge of architecture and cinema. It is not trivial, the problem of what spaces mean in films? What narrative role does it play? What vocabulary is relevant? This film is rather mundane in most ways. It is a biography of a fellow of influence. He’s quirky, but always in… Continue reading Visual Acoustics (2008)
A-Team (2010)
Architectural Plans I’m not going to denigrate what are usually called mindless summer movies, because I think there is something important here. Sure, the usual fears apply. Most people take the characters and world dynamics seriously. Yes, I know, but they would be doing that anyway. And young minds (say, younger than 30) are epigenetically… Continue reading A-Team (2010)
A Walk on the Moon (1999)
Nixon Wins This is a huge failure as a movie, but an interesting one in a way. At least for someone my age who lived through the period appropriated here. Here’s the basic challenge in showing a love story: how do you cinematically show the pulls on the heart? The usual solution is to fold… Continue reading A Walk on the Moon (1999)
A Very Long Engagement (2004)
Gluttony One of the hardest things in the world is to stop when you know you should, but the attraction, the romance of your obsession pulls you deeper and deeper into the thing. It happens with big things like love and little things like this film. It is so lovely and rich I want to… Continue reading A Very Long Engagement (2004)
A Separate Peace (2004)
Parallel Branches Some books seem natural for high school study. They need to be simple to read, but contain enough ambiguity and analogy to show students that real literature is more than a plot. If the book is set in high school, so much the better. I think the existence of this market niche is… Continue reading A Separate Peace (2004)
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Hazed and Dumfused “Waking Life” was simply dumb, a collection of clever ideas or various forms ill handled. Though it was adventurous in a couple ways, it lacked the edge it could have had. So instead of changing the lives of a few people, it entertainingly mollified many. This is much, much better. It attempts… Continue reading A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express (2010)
Loco Motives Lawrence Olivier was an actor who delivered rewards, but acting is not storytelling and sometimes the opposite is the case. He made a well regarded Hamlet and approached it as expected; he inhabited the character and let that being drive what was presented. If only he understood confounding dynamic structure the author erected… Continue reading Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express (2010)
Reasonable Doubt (2014)
Fixing, after the Fact Here is a project for film students: take this film, a loser, and make a great movie from it. I think I would add new footage about the hidden story here (the hooker), present the thing nonlinearly, shift the narrator and the stance of at least two of them and add… Continue reading Reasonable Doubt (2014)