Painful You wonder why filmmakers make the choices they do. Here is a filmmaker who specialises in acute realism, expansive vision and narrative clarity. He’s chosen a project designed to expand his palette, one that depends on claustrophobic madness and resulting visions. These visions are what we need for the untrusted narration. I don’t know… Continue reading The Woman in the Window (2021)
Category: Ones
Films rated one star out of three
Willy’s Wonderland (2021)
Mechanical I am interested in the projects that successful artists design for themselves. It often shows that they are less interesting than they appear. Actors in particular depend on surrounding artists that remain invisible. Cage’s work is all over the place, but this is pretty bad. I believe it was made because he wanted it… Continue reading Willy’s Wonderland (2021)
Monster Hunter (2020)
Lovers Back when I was doing this full time, I maintained a database of films where the filmmaker and actor (usually an actress) were lovers. It often imparts a situated intimacy, because you nearly literally see a soul through a lover’s eyes. Is there anything as erotic in fiction? I’m thinking of a Judy Garland… Continue reading Monster Hunter (2020)
Turning Red (2022)
Transitions When narrative transitions occur, they sometimes follow the world and seem smooth, or they try and engineer the future and are jagged. I think this is the latter. Superficially, this film extends the Disney effort to cover all ethnicities with princess characters. It makes business sense to have a modern Chinese girl, and let… Continue reading Turning Red (2022)
Extraordinary Measures (2010)
Dying You can see the pitch: real life, dying children, desperate father, two bankable actors who have made money in action movies but who sputter otherwise. In other words, there is no intent to put anything of value into this: it intends to milk us based on stuff banked by others. Unfortunately, everything — other… Continue reading Extraordinary Measures (2010)
Christopher Robin (2018)
Stuck in the Box The story is conventional Disney, and in the trend of expanding the reach of established properties, with as little actual drama as possible. Three things are notable to me. This was shot on video, with a deliberate nod to cheap TeeVee productions from decades ago. Every visual choice was designed to… Continue reading Christopher Robin (2018)
Blown Away (2019)
Someone Else’s Bubble I don’t know who originated the formula. I’ve seen it on “Legomasters”. You start with 8 teams, here 8 glass artists. You give them an assignment, material and some time. Then their creation is judged, someone eliminated until there is a winner. With Lego it works. The competitors are pairs — friends… Continue reading Blown Away (2019)
Haywire (2011)
Needles I saw this years ago and could not find anything useful to say about it. I saw it again because I am trying to understand what Soderbergh is doing with his life. He worries me because I have invested part of my life to films he has made. I know him to be capable… Continue reading Haywire (2011)
Ice Age 5: Collision Course (2016)
Acorny I cannot recall which of the previous I liked and why. It may have been the story that included the telling of a story. But that depends on coherence, and what have here are several sties or skits smeared into each other. There are the obligatory Scrat sequences that give some relief from the… Continue reading Ice Age 5: Collision Course (2016)
Aunt Peg’s Fulfilment (1981)
Unfulfilling Classic porn, the kind celebrated in “Boogie Nights”, cannot be avoided if you are serious about studying film. An amazing number of these, mostly from the 70s, have pretty cleverly engineered contexts. It is completely different than the porn of today, where there is no attempt at story. Often, those old films stretched for… Continue reading Aunt Peg’s Fulfilment (1981)