Until his sad, untimely death last month, Bill Paxton was one of the true under-celebrated actors of his generation. As a genre star, he had legions of dedicated fans (and apparently an army of co-stars eager to sing his praises as a decent, hard-working, charming guy to boot), but he always seemed more likely to register with casual movie-goers as That Guy.
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.
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.
Just last week, I bemoaned the state of Netflix’s streaming options and reoriented this column specifically to account for it. In what I can only assume is a startling indication of this column’s influence and reach, Netflix responded a week later by making the near-entirety of the Pioneers of African-American Cinema collection available.
A note on this recurring column formerly known as New on Netflix. Due to diminishing new titles of interest, an increased focus on television programming and original productions, and Netflix’s apparent preference for streaming things like Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, we are changing this up a bit.