Category:

Film

The Guest (Adam Wingard, 2014)

written by rick

Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett traffic in playful homage and neat subversion of other horror movies. Their 2011 low-budget collaboration You’re Next combined elements of home invasion and slasher flicks with an in-joke sensibility – a mumblecore Scream. With 2014’s The Guest, they went full-on John Carpenter, layering on the mounting dread and the insistent synth score, while drawing liberally (or borrowing wholesale) from the plot of The Stepfather and similar “who are you really?”

January 10, 2015 0 comment

Film Song for a Sunday

Song for a Sunday – Be My Baby (The Ronettes, Mean Streets)

written by rick

It’s hard sometimes to remember that Martin Scorcese, the undisputed elder statesman of American cinema and advocate for cinema more generally, was once a scrappy kid trying to cobble together a feature film.

But he definitely was, and that film was Mean Streets, a slice-of-life portrait of what it means to make it in America, specifically as an Italian-American male, and focused on barely grown-up kids struggling with crime, faith, and responsibility.

January 5, 2015 0 comment

Commentary Film

2014 Year In Review: Movies That Won’t Win Awards

written by rick

It’s awards season, and there’s no shortage of commentary. I might chime in myself in a few weeks. (Spoilers: Boyhood, Ida, The Immigrant, Under The Skin, and Noah would win all the things if it were up to me, and Uma Thurman would get a best Supporting Actress nod for Nymphomaniac Vol 1 — it is not, it turns out, up to me.)

December 31, 2014 2 comments

Film Song for a Sunday

Song for a Sunday – Hip To Be Square (Huey Lewis and The News, American Psycho)

written by rick

“I like my bands in business suits, I watch them on TV
I’m working out ‘most everyday and watching what I eat
They tell me that it’s good for me, but I don’t even care
I know that it’s crazy
I know that it’s nowhere
But there is no denying that
It’s hip to be square!”

December 28, 2014 0 comment

Film

Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981)

written by rick

Warren Beatty’s 1981 passion project Reds is such a sprawling monster of a movie that it’s difficult to figure out how to approach it.

It’s a 195-minute epic he devoted years and years to bringing to the screen, about the American journalist John Reed (the only American buried at the Kremlin), the Russian Revolution, leftist sectarian politics in the U.S.

December 27, 2014 0 comment

Film

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962)

written by rick

Luis Bunuel created a masterpiece in The Exterminating Angel, a savagely funny satire of bourgeois manners and the latent brutality they barely manage to conceal. Alternately, it might be a shameless rip-off of the 6^th Season Buffy episode Older and Far Away which, presumably through some magic portal or Faustian bargain, Bunuel was able to view 40 years in advance.

December 25, 2014 0 comment

Film

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani, 2014)

written by rick

From its arthouse title to its opening act, drawing heavily on Dario Argento’s color palette and prog-rock scores, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears announces itself as a meta-genre movie, aimed pretty squarely at fans of giallo and exploitation, though straddling a line into the uncanny just enough to please the David Lynch and Bunuel fans in the crowd.

December 25, 2014 0 comment

Film Reviews

Noah (Darren Aronofsky, 2014)

written by rick

Despite its huge budget, action movie trappings, and scriptural focus, there was never any real concern that American auteur Darren Aronofsky was going to make a boring sandal-clad, desert epic. The person behind Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, and Black Swan is seemingly incapable of approaching any material without transforming it into a “Darren Aronofsky project” in the process.

December 21, 2014 0 comment

Film Song for a Sunday

Song for a Sunday – In Dreams (Roy Orbison, Blue Velvet)

written by rick

I won’t lie – I’ve always found Roy Orbison kind of creepy. And I say this as a fan.

I know “Oh, Pretty Woman” was supposed to make us feel warm and fuzzy in the Julia Roberts film of almost the same name, but it filled with me dread instead.

December 21, 2014 0 comment

Film Reviews

Obvious Child (Gillian Robespierre, 2014)

written by rick

It was probably inevitable that Gillian Robespierre and Jenny Slate’s Obvious Child would be greeted as “the first abortion rom-com.” That’s like catnip to critics and headline-writers everywhere, and it’s true as far as it goes.

But having finally caught up to seeing the movie, I think it also obscures the bigger story: that Obvious Child is something of a miracle, a film that could’ve sabotaged itself at almost any step of the way but ended up being one of the most charming, funny, and welcome movies of the year, with one of the best lead performances.

December 21, 2014 0 comment

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