Letterboxd — Your life in film

Note: I'll just use this entry to post my thoughts on each short from season three, so I don't clutter up my feed

If you’ve grown up on 80’s or 90’s animated kids shows, you may have taken a brief gander at some of today’s animated offerings and lamented how there’s a distinct lack of robots compared to the ones you grew up on. This series has been a brief salve for those that yearn for a more innocent time…

This movie is a cinephile’s wet dream. It’s playful and self-referential. It’s abstract and arty, but like Lynch’s films it has a core narrative thread that’s easy enough to follow, even though you might be lost to what it could be alluding to on a larger symbolic/metaphoric level. I think the problem some people have with Lynch in particular is that they try to see too much in his films, and deliberately try to decode what something means as they’re…

Wow, this actually didn’t suck. I’ve been Marveled out for awhile now and decided to check out the first episode after hearing some good things about it. To my amazement, I quickly found myself compelled to watch the entire thing, and I now think this is the second best Marvel series after “Loki.” One of the biggest reasons for its success (if not the biggest), is Oscar Isaac’s dual performance depicting two completely different individuals that inhabit the same body.…

This is one of those movies where the idea of it is intrinsically funny, but after viewing it you get the deflated sense that simply watching the trailer would’ve sufficed. I don’t know if a film like this makes me appreciate Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant scripts like “Being John Malkovich,” and “Adaptation” even more than I already do, but it certainly reminds me of how difficult it is to achieve that delicate balance they all maintain between high concept ideas that…

I think cinema has warped my perception of what a depression-era circus lifestyle was really like. The reality of it was surely deplorable in many cases, but in my mind, I imagine that living amongst a motley collection of freaks, outcasts, and smarmy carnival barkers would be weirdly fun, with grand adventures to be had with eccentric, likeminded chums. I think the way that I view this old-time circus environment with a kind of adolescent wonderment is partly due to…

For years, I lived with the weight of a secret that I was forced to keep hidden. You see… I merely pretended to like Paul Thomas Anderson’s early films, even though I found them distant, overwritten, and even somewhat pretentious. Of course, I played the fool, and even wrote long diatribes on the old IMDB boards exalting their rich characterization, deftly interwoven narratives, and poetic insight into the inexplicable connections that link us through the muck and beauty of the…

It’s a question that’s been posed from practically the beginning of cinema: how do you adapt The Bard onto screen? Do you keep the prose intact? Do you dare change around any major plot points or characters? I’ve seen a good amount of Shakespeare’s most famous film adaptations, and from the results, it’s clear there’s no easy answers. It’s been posited for ages that many of Shakespeare’s best plays—like “Hamlet”—work better on the page than the stage. I would say…

Wow, why didn’t any of y’all tell me about this film? This is one of those movies where after the first five minutes, you already know you’re watching something great that’s hitting on all cylinders and will manage to keep it up until its very last frame. It’s pretty surreal in a lot of ways too. Musicals are an inherently abstract genre, and they often incorporate a theme on the conflict between fantasy and reality—a conceit that “La La Land”…