I wasn't feeling well last night and landed on this initially as a distraction. I decided to play a game where I imagined I didn't know Star Wars as Star Wars and only had the experience of what movies were like prior to 1977. Through this lens it's a very strange movie, goofy and homemade compared to the bigger-budget polish of Spielberg's Close Encounters which came out the same year. For all the fixation of the past 40 years on…
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The Verdict 1982
Now THIS is a picture.
There's a bitter quaintness to the fact that in 1982 the worst thing anyone could imagine happening to the Archdiocese of Boston was a negligence suit against a Catholic hospital.
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The French Dispatch 2021
On one level, Anderson devises a new formal language to approximate the experience of reading a periodical. On the level below, his formal language is expanding to accommodate his human subjects: the editor, his writers, their subjects. The word that keeps coming to mind is generosity. Howitzer's generosity to his writers, which allows their essays to play out true to their voices; the writers' generosity to their subjects, seeking to immortalize them sympathetically and honestly; and the rare generosity reciprocated…
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The Green Knight 2021
The first half hour or so is a compendium of contemporary American cinematic cliches: the movie as trailer for itself, whispered mumblings as dialogue, dimly lit digital cinematography as a substitute for texture, hazy insert shots alternating with slow push ins and pull outs as a substitute for style. As others have pointed out, when Lowery isn't going for money shots he falls back on the most banal kind of coverage. Then Gawain finally leaves on his journey to the…
