Now see here, my good man. For the last half hour you've been saying goodbye and staying on. I wish you'd say 'How do you do' and go!
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On Dangerous Ground 1951
A real can't-go-home-again moment in that I probably can never recreate the visceral, off-the-rails experience of first seeing this at a massive Nicholas Ray retro about 20 years ago, where I honestly felt like I was riding in a roller coaster from the first couple of minutes in, all the way through RR's "why d'ya make me do it!", his partner lecturing him in the alley, the handheld shit, the whip pans, the impatient, fragmented sequence in the upstate town,…
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Mank 2020
I'd like nothing more than to plead guilty to disliking this film for reasons of Welles loyalty - which, if you know me, I expect is something you already know runs very high for me and repels most small arms fire. No, the antagonism between Welles and Mankiewicz in Fincher's movie is, generously, greatly exaggerated by many of the early previews, the impressions gleaned from trailers, and subsequent publicity-adjacent clickbait articles. The washed-up writer on a long bid for a…
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Only Angels Have Wings 1939
nth viewing, following recent revisits with His Girl Friday, Ceiling Zero, and others. Becoming as recently attuned to "flaws" that are not flaws at all but (a) subjects and (b) byproducts of a turbulent interaction between author and text. Things like Barthelmess's performance - mind you, Bat's arc is, in lockstep with Kid's, one of the most wrenchingly emotional, or emotionally wrenching, offered in the Hawksverse - being just slightly too enunciated, against the house rules of Hawksian verisimiltude. And…
