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Andor: A Disney+ Day Special Look 2022
Placeholder to mark season one of Andor. I have my quibbles with its overall length but there is no denying this scratched a tremendous itch, formally-speaking. Wide-eyed and crystalline in equal measure, I can't get enough of this sort of 'high classical realism' or whatever it is Gilroy is doing here.
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Backdraft 1991
Incredibly broken, insultingly silly and gorgeous* at every moment and yet somehow this is one of the most tedious and confused studio products of its time. Nobody knows what they’re doing in this but they’re trying, oh are they ever.
*In one of his last films as a DP before switching over to directing (Blue Lagoon: The Awakening), Mikael Salomon makes a definitive contribution to that utterly beautiful oeuvre of mainstream 90’s widescreen aesthetics - that perfect window from 1990-97…
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Knight of Cups 2015
So simple, and yet it almost totally eluded me on last viewing: Malick's main musical motifs here - Grieg's "Ases dod," Kilar's "Exodus," Part's "Silouan's Song" and Vaughn Williams' "Fantasia" - all naturally build to ecstatic resolutions through repetition and release; undulating waves of emotion that emerge not so much as a climaxes but as walls of sheer catharsis. Encountering each of these pieces in the context of a late Malick work invites eager anticipation - who couldn't after the…
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi 2017
Since Looper and Breaking Bad, I have struggled to put my finger on a deep sense of dissatisfaction inherent within Johnson's compositions involving actors, which are simultaneously brisk, clean, and efficient, and yet bereft of texture, detail, or a lively perspective. They are actually pretty blandly imagined; organized according to the most basic and brutish principals of dividing space between a face and whatever else happens to be around or behind it.
In a similar sense, Johnson's facility with said…
