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.
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.
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.
When the French comedians and prank-enthusiasts Nicolas & Bruno were putting together In Search of the Ultra Sex, did they anticipate its rave reviews, midnight screening success, and repeated, somewhat bewildering comparisons to Michael Hazanavicius?
This is, after all, a film with no new visual content, constructed entirely out of vintage Canal+ porno excerpts and overlaid idiot dialog in the spirit of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
The start of the new year is, for better or worse, a moment to pause, consider, and resolve. If you’re like me, most of those resolutions won’t amount to much. It’s arbitrary on a number of levels and a bit silly (no, you’re not going to start doing pushups every morning, and no, you’re almost certainly not taking up hang-gliding), but it’s as good a reason as any to tackle something new.
It’s New Year’s Eve! Now that we’ve taken care of the Best of 2016, why not read some shameless Luddite Robot self-promotion?
For better or worse, your impressively humble narrator managed to post quite a few pieces in 2016. Some are better than others, but all of them have one thing in common: namely, words.
Quality horror films rarely make a huge amount at the box office, at least since the grindhouse days. Word-of-mouth only counts for so much, and many movies we now recognize as genre classics have had to wait for their cult followings.
The tradition of updating Rudyard Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book every 25 years or so continued in 2016, with Jon Favreau’s very beautiful, decidedly dark and tense take on the story, new to Netflix this week. Although Bill Murray gets some laughs as Baloo and belts out “Bare Necessities”, this Jungle Book mostly finds the young Mowgli in crouched peril or running for his life, which allows for lots of impressive set-pieces but also begs the question who this thing is supposed to be for.
It is impossible to talk about G.W. Pabst’s 1929 masterpiece Pandora’s Box without talking about Louise Brooks. Brooks’ innocent, irrepressibly pansexual Lulu isn’t merely the heart of the film but the film itself. The story itself dates back much further, and Pabst is one of the great Weimar directors, but Brooks’ image — both the public’s perception of her at the time and the literal image of her face — animates everything about it, then and since.