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Midnight Run 1988
Rewatched this during a bout of insomnia and was struck by how well it holds up after twenty years. Incredible rapport between DeNiro and Grodin in a cross-country adventure with the former as a bounty hunter trying to bring in the latter, a former mob accountant with a price on his head who's skipped bail. Pitch-perfect direction, completely moving characters (especially for this genre), and a smart script make this surely one of the most satisfying action films I've ever seen. So warm and comic!
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The Great Gatsby 2013
Baz Luhrmann's lush 3-D retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's much-loved (and twice poorly adapted) novel of class and romance in 1920s New York. I'd probably not have been moved at all if I hadn't seen it on the big screen; since I did, though, I was in awe of the spectacle. The party scenes are magnificent; the recreation of the city's geography during the period is splendid. Especially fine is the soundtrack, with anachronistic music that sets the tone well…
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Django Unchained 2012
As always, I paid to go see Quentin Tarantino's latest release. As always, there were long stretches of film narrative that had me engaged, and characters that had me interested. And as always, I walked away feeling ambivalent because of the irresponsible way he depicts violence: as both an occasion for celebratory evisceration and a gravely comic misrepresentation of what real violence is like. As I anticipated (see michaelborshuk.blogspot.com/2012/08/notes-on-popular-culture-quentin.html) I was particularly irked by the way that QT depicts graphic…
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Lawrence of Arabia 1962
I could never describe this as anything less than a staggering achievement and I'm glad that my first encounter with it was at a retro showing on the big screen last night. While I'm ambivalent about the conventional colonial narrative, the visuals alone make this worth seeing, even if the first hour of the film drags a bit with a little too much self-congratulatory lingering on amazing photographic set-ups. Incredible cast too. The rapport between O'Toole and Sharif (tending always toward the homosocial, it feels) was wonderful.
