August 2010
9 posts
Seriously, is anyone in charge over there? Yesterday they had a man drawing John Madden yellow circles around the area where Ted Stevens’ plane crashed. Can they drop the second N and just be CN?
I wonder what he was, what he did.
– The beauty of “Bullitt” is that it values the human life. In a move filled with fast cars and deadly weapons, each death has an impact, feels like a loss, a shame. The end chase is all build, the slowest burn to a release so quick it must be real. And even though we root for Bullitt the...
New Rule
Henceforth, only Part Three of your film series may be 3-D. At that point, The Law of Diminishing Returns (excepting The Pixar Rule) dictates the extra dimension may be necessary to excite an audience fatigued by tired characters and storylines. Little Fockers should undergo immediate conversion now.
July 2010
16 posts
The internet nerdgasm starts now. Tron.
Full Social Network trailer. The warm interior lighting and a man driven by ego, greed, and desire are all classic Fincher territory, which bodes well for him elevating essentially a small, petty story.
Buttle
A list was sent to law enforcement and the media today that claimed to list 1,300 “illegal immigrants” living in Utah.
Each page of the list is headed with the words “Illegal Immigrants” and each entry contains details about the individuals listed — from their address and telephone number to their date of birth and, in the case of pregnant women, their due dates. The letter was...
June 2010
21 posts
Empty Summer
To those complaining about the lack of any good movies out right now (and happen to live near a good theater), I offer the following retort:
Winter’s Bone - The rare mix of (1) a thoughtful, elegiac indie picture that really explores place and (2) a tight, driven narrative. It has the thematic depth of a novel and the narrative economy of the best film noirs. Jennifer Lawrence owns every...
Never thought I’d see a mixture of Broken Bells, Christina Hendricks, and sci-fi/fantasy, but here we are. (via Vulture)
May 2010
30 posts
Shorting Financial Reform
“In private, reasonable discussions we were able to persuade our friends in the Senate to prevent votes on amendments hostile to our interests — the worst of which, I might add, was dreamed up by yet another female senator. But the minute a vote was held, and senators sensed the cameras watching, even our friends abandoned us to the mob. All of these people are continually engaged in the...
"Agreeable." →
“And yet: the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, and a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste.”
An excellent short story by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker about the feelings of adolescent angst, loneliness, and injustice in an uncaring...