Letterboxd — Your life in film

This movie's virtues and vices are all tied up in being spread all over the damn place in story and in tone, and in building admirably in its second half from a notably discombobulated first. I haven't read Alice Hoffman's novel, but I'd opine with some confidence that the script catches its spirit and plot in some moments but skates erratically over both in whole stretches. I fully expected the kind of star outing where the supporting cast shines brightest,…

After my What's Love Got to Do with It rewatch, I'm just victory-lapping with Angela Bassett, who's rarely (never?) been as breezy and relaxed on screen as she is here, in an atypical comic role. But of course it's Bernie Mac's movie, and it's on his shoulders that this works at all, despite or because of the rudimentary writing, obvious theme, and bungled finish. At every turn, Mr. 3000 foregrounds Mac's personal charm, even when he's playing a shit. This…

I've of course seen this many times, but I made this revisit deluxe by reading I, Tina just beforehand. It's a remarkable testimony, and while the film tailors and transforms quite a few of the episodes it reproduces, most of the memoir's spirit is unmistakably here on screen.

As is so much else! The editing of What's Love... gets stronger as we go, tightening the vise while birthing a star, placing euphoric performance and (mostly) private misery into repeated whiplash…

You thought I was going to change my mind. I did not change my mind. I still think this is a nasty little stainless-steel contraption, with a broad satiric grin but a dead-earnest disgust, edging just enough into credible self-loathing that the filmmakers don't strike me as self-exempting.

Of course The Menu is fed up with the hyper-rich, but it is just as plainly a skewering of the aspirational taste-making classes (very Letterboxd, very Film Twitter, very me, very you)…

I understood I had little chance of liking it as much as I did the first two. I had no inkling, though, what a near-total repudiation Magic Mike's Last Dance is of everything that made its predecessors engaging, clever, spicy, and funny, in their very different ways. And I certainly had no forewarning that I'd enjoy myself about as little as I did at The Whale.

The screenplay, if you could call it that, is comdislabobuted, i.e., discombobulated to such…

Third time through, and I keep responding better.

I may replace this with a real review, but for now: if you live in Chicago and can make it to the Gene Siskel Film Center downtown from 11-12 this morning, I'll be giving a presentation about different sorts of craftsmanship (or, I regret to inform, its absence) in five of this year's Best Picture nominees: Banshees, Fabelmans, Top Gun, Triangle of Sadness, and Women Talking. And/or, come to the same spot…

I had expected more background and exposition about Navalny's life, his precise political orientations, and his unusual stature as a journalist, activist, and lawyer in advance of becoming better-known as a nominal political candidate and then even more so as a Kremlin target and political prisoner. The shoulder-to-shoulder stance of this documentary, made with its subject even more than about him, narrows and arguably distorts our point of view by closing off some lines of inquiry—though it should also be…

Tár's just got more cards in its hand than most movies this year have in their whole deck. It's also remarkably fertile on re-viewing. Almost every character and moment has at least one unexpected double, often where you wouldn't be looking for one. In almost every scene, Blanchett's performance withholds information that would help decipher that incident and yet feeds you information that illuminates some other plot point or through line. Almost everything that most impresses me about her performance…

Part of a trip back to 1934.
Full viewing digest for that year here.

Watch Hitchcock go on a journey from Fuck this kid to Fuck this kid, but she didn't deserve THAT to... well, I won't spoil it.

Also, notice how we transition from neutral, isolationist Switzerland to verbal allusions to World War I to the whole third act becoming basically a war movie. So deftly done, and an unexpected counter-harmonic to the main plot, where the central couple…