At a pivotal moment in Jordan Peele’s unbelievably assured horror debut Get Out, something snaps in one of the characters, and he delivers the title’s imperative with wide-eyed urgency to our protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya). “GET. OUT.”
It’s an appropriately self-referential moment for a film that knows exactly what it is doing.
Oscar season is almost over! Soon, we will finally put the year to bed and get to work on the important things, like determining which films seem to be early contenders for Academy Award attention next year.
The other day, we provided some guidance to this year’s prestige awards, drawn from our viewing, reading, and arbitrary hunches.
Dog Eat Dog has all the trademarks and tics you’d expect from Paul Schrader — twitchy griminess, awkward dialog, stray mentions of faith, ultra-violence, losers who just can’t win, cocaine, samurai references. But it’s overwhelming, mean-spirited mood connotes revenge more than anything else.
With the Academy Awards being handed out this Sunday, it’s a popular and appropriate time for Oscar predictions. Any number of determining factors can help narrow down the field to an expected choice, and odds-makers all over the world are weighing in.
Nearly every review of Oscar Assayas‘ weird, lovely Clouds of Sils Maria eventually brings up the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, and I don’t see why this one should be any different.
The Juliette Binoche/Kristen Stewart two-hander often plays like Assayas received some sort of Five Obstructions-like challenge to conjure up something “Bergmanesque” without the benefit of Sven Nyquist or Liv Ullmann.
I don’t want to startle any of my readers, but it turns out I’m a white guy. Watching I Am Not Your Negro, this couldn’t have been clearer.
Perhaps you may have gleaned this fact about me somehow — say, my weird focus on Nicolas Cage or the fact that I genuinely, almost angrily enjoy La La Land.
Movies, as we all know, are too long.
In the past, I’ve tended to roll my eyes at this allegation, chalking it up to the short-attention spans of the philistines who’d rather rewatch an episode of The Office yet again than encounter something new and daring, something incisive and in love with the image, something that has the unmitigated gall to last more than 45 minutes.
It’s almost a cliche to focus on opening or closing shots of a movie, as though these bookends hold within them all the mysteries the “middle section” (i.e. the film) will explore. But in the case of Fritz Lang’s masterpiece M, that virtuoso opening really does clue us in to the kind of film we’ll be encountering, its aesthetic and concerns.
In its opening title card, Kirsten Johnson describes her acclaimed documentary Cameraperson as a memoir of her 25 years of filmmaking. Of course, any individual film is itself a memoir of sorts, preserving moments in time when subjects collided and collaborated and performed; it’s the nature of the medium.
Now that Betsy DeVos has been confirmed as our Secretary of Education of Bizarro World, she’s going to have a steep learning curve. This would be true for any newly-confirmed Cabinet member, but it seems particularly urgent in Betsy DeVos’ case, who shows no indication of even baseline competency for the position.