Patterned Don’t read until after seeing this. Very likely, the effectiveness of this comes from a few key people with deep experience in the stage, plus possibly one person with a sensitive philosophy of blocking. So if you talked to them, you’d get a bunch of very interesting, even fascinating tradecraft. But for me, that… Continue reading The Outfit (2022)
Category: New Comments
Comments made since the IMBD era, for here
Bilitis (1977)
Wonder In collecting my old IMDB comments for moving to this site, I find a few hundred missing — possibly a thousand. There was an era in IMDB history — before Facebook and Twitter — where IMDB was a social media hub. My comments were an attractor for the worst sort, and they ended up… Continue reading Bilitis (1977)
Paws of Fury The Legend of Hank (2022)
Cat Play Viewer paradigms are evolving quickly in the film world. I think the COVID lull has stopped that temporarily as we wash out the projects like this that were on automatic pilot during that era. By evolving, I mean that we as viewers build more and more devices for self-awareness in the film narrative.… Continue reading Paws of Fury The Legend of Hank (2022)
Art Deco Detective (1994)
Scrambled Egg Dialog You likely will have already been warned off this amazingly bad production. So many beginner mistakes and production drags will kill your experience. But I have to say that there are two script ideas that are promising. The first is simply that our noir detective is not simply manipulated by the writer… Continue reading Art Deco Detective (1994)
Schlitz On Mount Washington (1935)
Benny Hill’s Slippers This would have been one of the shorts on a program designed to fill out a date night. It is just filler, basically slapstick on skis. The joke is that the performer is an extraordinary expert to be able to appear so clumsy. It is not just a waste of time for… Continue reading Schlitz On Mount Washington (1935)
Gumnaam (1965)
Indians This is a famously popular film in India. The composition is simple: a story that gives the film an existence, and a series of Bollywood musical numbers. I cannot recall ever experiencing such dissonance, because I am coming at the from a background in Christie. That tradition — at least the elements I like… Continue reading Gumnaam (1965)
The White Cockatoo (1935)
Bible Verses I pride myself on being able to say something both useful and positive about a film, a discipline a wise man taught as a practice for the more useful challenge with souls we meet. The dynamics overlap in narratives that each carry. I found it a bit difficult this time around, because my… Continue reading The White Cockatoo (1935)
Alibi Mark (1937)
Signs of Trauma, Film as Meal Wow, what a strange film. My interest in these comments is in the qualities of introspection: where the viewer is placed in the narrative and how different layers of that stance are manipulated. The CCC, as duly described in this film, was a sort of civilian army designed to… Continue reading Alibi Mark (1937)
Bullet Train (2022)
Stations I admit to thinking the Deadpool experiments are offensive. They have introspection of the kind I study, but it is one-dimensional and the humour doesn’t justify the sacrifice of self-aware sophistication. But this folds in the best parts of ‘Pulp Fiction’, and I find it superior in many ways. I find Tarantino’s literal quotes… Continue reading Bullet Train (2022)
Trents Last Case (1952)
Hidden This should be a superb movie in the mystery tradition. It has a truly complex plot that has several reveals, and a suitably Holmes-like detective. The problem is that we see the detective working things out like a Poirot would. But we learn absolutely nothing until the end. So I cannot recommend it on… Continue reading Trents Last Case (1952)