…look, you all knew this was coming. Here’s the thing about last Sunday’s Oscar ceremony: I don’t remember most of it. That might be a good thing. In my mind, the inability to recall vast swaths of the show signals the following: Nobody said anything embarrassing (a’la Travolta introducing Idina Menzel as Adele Dazeem) Nobody said … Continue reading
Fair warning: I really didn’t want to write this piece, and I’m doing it out of misguided obligation. Maybe I’m whining, but cut me some slack; I’ve already written about the #OscarsSoWhite fracas, and also contributed a handful of yadda yaddas to Paste Magazine’s annual Oscar preview (though I spend most of my yaddas turning my nose up at the … Continue reading
“For aficionados of brutal genre films, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant has enough to keep you satisfied. Find scenes of bravura violence photographed by an eminent cinematographer (the great Emmanuel Lubezki). Find the vague impression of deep, abiding meaning. Find bear-mauling, equine disembowelment. Find rape, castration, graphic suffering. Find additional suffering. Find more suffering. And … Continue reading
I’ll just leave this right here. My tendency to go hot-and-cold on the films of Quentin Tarantino* is well-known; the fact that I am almost robbed of words to describe my feelings toward the teaser for his latest, Django Unchained, should speak highly of its quality**. From Christoph Waltz devouring the screen with the same satisfaction … Continue reading
Early America was a remarkable place, unique as the one nation where people from all around the world could come together and be called equal. The color of one’s skin, one’s native language, and one’s economic status didn’t matter. Once you arrived in America, it made no difference, because in America everyone was treated the … Continue reading
(Warning: The following review delves ever so slightly into spoiler territory, so you may wish to avoid reading this if you haven’t watched the movie yet.) And for his next trick, Martin Scorsese does his very best M. Night Shyamalan impression and tries his hand at the horror genre. Shutter Island, by all means, isn’t … Continue reading
Inception, in its fashion, feels well-worn and familiar but only because the trick of the film is a favorite of director Chris Nolan’s. Indeed, he pulled it off just two years ago with 2008’s The Dark Knight, a sincere if bloated attempt at inciting a mainstream cultural phenomenon framed within an equally genuine bid at … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 