Camp I think making a Christie film must be hard, because so seldom does it work. For me, the metric is very simple. We need to be allowed to speculate against multiple impossibilities. Many folks will be exposed for hidden, possibly relevant qualities. What makes Christie work is that at the end, things are explained,… Continue reading Ten Little Indians (1989)
2012 (2009)
Foreground – Background When you make a film that is nothing but flavoured special effects, when you make the matter of those effects into a character, you have two decisions to make. The first is whether you are dealing with object or environment. This is a fairly significant decision because two different technologies and craft… Continue reading 2012 (2009)
Iron Man 3 (2013)
Refreshing I’m surprised that Downey has held out this long. At some point, you have enough money and want to return to your art. He says this is his last, and I believe him. What we have in this case is him on his way out, dictating terms. And we have a pretty good movie… Continue reading Iron Man 3 (2013)
Ex Machina (2014)
Alpha City This is a superb film. I recommend it highly. My enjoyment of films is divided between the experience when watching and the much longer incubation time afterward. The success in the former in this case fights the appreciation in the latter. This kind of science fiction is all about abstraction. The world is… Continue reading Ex Machina (2014)
Mystery Road (2013)
Wholeness in What You Sow All of us want to be genuinely ourselves, and nearly all of us are at the mercy of societal imprints with urges so great we cannot escape them. Few of us can be calm in ourselves. I suppose this is one reason we seek films that are genuine and/or characters… Continue reading Mystery Road (2013)
Lightyear (2022)
Andy’s World The first thing — and the most important thing — a film does is establish where it will sit between your mind and the worlds you know. Often there is some clever interplay between what it is directly, and what games it will play with you about that identity and yours. I’ve called… Continue reading Lightyear (2022)
Inside the Room (1935)
Clean on Top, Dirty on Bottom There are several events in US history that damaged the nation. We will not recover from the Civil War for generations if current politics remain, as they surely will. Prohibition and abortion. Wars. Book burnings. Among these is the Hayes act. Just as we were discovering the narrative power… Continue reading Inside the Room (1935)
Rio 2 (2014)
People, Not Situations Getting back into thinking about how narratives get put together, I am reminded of how many radically different strategies there are in approaching a film. If you talk to the (old) Pixar guys, what you’ll hear is a focus on story, a cinematic notion of story, above all else. The story comes… Continue reading Rio 2 (2014)
Paddington (2014)
Birds Years ago, when I saw Billy Elliot, my attention was drawn away from where it was intended. I saw instead a tragic film about a little girl whose mother was more interested in a talented outsider. That mother was played by the redoubtable Julie Walters; her presence compared to the weakness of the others… Continue reading Paddington (2014)
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Detectives There’s something profoundly offensive about this. Oh, it isn’t the gratuitous catalog of stereotypes. It is the fact that they are stereotypes, unmodified in any way. It isn’t that it doesn’t move, but that it does so without passion. Borrowing is part of life, but a simple collage is different than a living ecosystem.… Continue reading Inglourious Basterds (2009)