October 2011
8 posts
11 tags
Concerning the Nina Foch Course
The incredible success of Avatar deserves much of the credit for mainstreaming 3-D movies, but its historical significance likely rests more in being an emphatic announcement that digital filmmaking had arrived. What that means for Hollywood and commercial filmmaking is, at this point, known to all: digital technology, cheaper and easier to use than its analog predecessors, has broken down the...
13 tags
The Week in Review: "The Three Musketeers"
I didn’t have high hopes for Paul W. S. Anderson’s new adaptation of The Three Musketeers. In all honesty, I was kind of hoping that it wouldn’t be any good, because the 1993 Brat Pack version is probably my favorite movie ever and the eight-year-old that lives inside me didn’t want to see it topped. Little could I have imagined, however, the spectacular, horrible ease with which my darkest hopes...
13 tags
The Unauteur: David Lean vs. Auteur Theory
Or, The AFI List Project #36: Bridge on the River Kwai Is it possible to be underrated if you directed the greatest movie of all time? That’s the puzzle that confronted me this week when I was thinking about Bridge on the River Kwai and, in particular, its director, David Lean, who was also responsible for several romances, two adaptations of Dickens novels, and such classic epics as Doctor...
18 tags
The Week In Review: When There's Nothing To See
This is the space where I would usually be reviewing a movie that I saw over the weekend, or where I would be conspicuously silent because I hadn’t had the time to make it to the movies. That won’t happen this week because, for the first time since the (recent) launch of the Week in Review feature, I had the time to go and chose not to. Why did I choose not to? Because there was nothing to...
14 tags
Bad Movies that Masquerade as Good Movies: A Case...
Hollywood presents us with about 400 movies to choose from over the course of a given year. Of this number it’s safe to bet that there will be a few that will be pretty good, a somewhat larger number that will be atrocious, and a vast majority that will range from pretty bad to mostly competent.
Usually, it’s not hard to tell which of those categories a movie falls into: you and I might disagree...
16 tags
The Week in Review: "The Ides of March"
One thing I noted as central to the success of Mr Smith Goes to Washington was that, though a political movie, it doesn’t actively subscribe to a particular ideology. Instead, it inhabits a sort of undefined place where the actions of individual politicians and how they manipulate constituents and political process is far more important than ideological grandstanding. We never even know what party...
4 tags
DailyLounge.com: The Best Traditionally Animated... →
Sorry for the long delay in posting — I’ve been on vacation for the past week and haven’t gotten a chance to focus on the blog. There should be a “Week in Review” on The Ides of March tomorrow and a feature article on Friday, but if you can’t wait, here’s the short recap I wrote for DailyLounge.com on the best hand-drawn animated films.
10 tags
DailyLounge.com: When Did This Once-Good Show... →
Head over to the DailyLounge to read the Jentleman’s take on when some of America’s favorite TV shows took a turn for the shitty. This only covers shows that are still going, so the collapse of Entourage couldn’t be discussed.
