I’m lukewarm on the Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins film, but to say that Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s take on West Side Story blew me away is an understatement. Spielberg had been wanting to make a musical for a very long time, and it shows in every single frame of this. By making alterations from the 1961 film, the 2021 adaptation of West Side Story both stands on its own and largely improves on the original, resulting in yet…
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Captain Marvel 2019
Watched with commentary by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck. While not as great as their HALF NELSON commentary, this one was still very good and gave some fair insight into making the film, especially in regards to how much thought they put into the visualization, their aesthetic choices and how they fit the story, and it’s so refreshing to see directors on an MCU joint who clearly care about this kind of stuff when so many directors…
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Nope 2022
A scathing indictment of the industry and how it continuously exploits both artists and animals in various ways, as well as a sublime film about our relationship to spectacle and how we perceive it. Wholly earns the Steven Spielberg comparisons, yet still 100% it’s own thing. There’s so much going on here symbolically and subtextually, but even if one can’t fully make sense of it all (understandably so because there’s a lot going on here), this still wholly delivers on…
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Confession of Murder 2012
Jung Byung-gil is already swinging for the fences with his first narrative feature, particularly with its ballsy plotting and tonal shifts. Not only does this have some bizarre (in a good way) twists, but it goes from tonally dour thriller to slapstick comedy without any noticeable build up, and yet, it all totally works. Also boasts great performances across the board and at least two banger chase sequences to boot. Between this, THE VILLAINESS, and CARTER, I’m super into what this guy is doing.
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In the Heights 2021
Remember when musicals used to be made by directors who knew how to shoot and stage them?
Looks and feels far too artificial for it to work, as it is so easy to tell what was shot on location and what was shot on soundstage. It doesn’t help that the narrative and characters are already incredibly shallow in execution and the emotional beats are manufactured and unearned, but it doesn’t work as a musical either, given both the inept blocking/staging…
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Malcolm & Marie 2021
Sam Levinson directly to jail.
It’s painfully obvious from the getgo that Levinson got ridiculously offended by one negative review for Assassination Nation (a film that, despite its many flaws, I found to be a relatively enjoyable work of genre schlock), so much that he made a student film with dialogue that feels like it were written by an Aaron Sorkin-wannabe and made John David Washingnton’s character a stand-in for himself, and that alone creates the problem of thinking he is…
