On Oppenheimer
A film can be as well-regarded as this one, and still underrated. A few notes on what makes Nolan's latest so special.
On Michael Mann's Heat
Everyone has a take on Mann's masterpiece. Here I focus on how the film illuminated to me, as a young viewer, the possibilities and validity of film as art.
On Tom McCarthy's Stillwater
A few words on why this picture so resonates, and why it’s so needed now.
The Lie & How to See It: On Hate, Despair & Hope in Contemporary Film
The year 2018 marked the first year when all productions released were greenlit after the 2016 election. A new breed of fatalism has spread into cinema. I explore the drawbacks of such a perspective here. PDF version here.
Sunset (Napszállta): a Reappraisal
An exploration into one of recent cinema's best, most challenging and most ignored works, and why the critical community ignored it.
Addressing Despair: Nathan on First Reformed
Here we go full-bore into Schrader's 2018 Bresson-inspired masterpiece, paying particular attention to its compositional sense and editorial choices, citing visual examples from Taxi Driver and the works of Andrea Arnold and Wes Anderson.
Burning
There's no other film like Lee Chang-Dong's masterpiece, which ought to have taken the Palme d'or in 2018.
On Paterson: A Bus Driver Reviews the New Bus Driver Movie!
How could I resist? How could I not be convinced Jarmusch and co. somehow knew abut me? A bus driver character who's a thin, brown-haired, brown-eyed man in his thirties (I think you know this age and body type are rare in our profession!), an artist, specifically one who translates his work experience into writing; who's amiable toward all, doesn't like smartphones or social media, takes pleasure in listening to passengers' conversations, and (like most operators too), is extremely comfortable interacting with all class and race backgrounds. Yeah. It's downright scary. Even down to the character's Persian girlfriend, which was once true for me, and his not exactly loving affinity for dogs. All joking aside, it's an affecting and deceptively simple picture that knows it doesn't need to be more than it is.
Once Upon a Time... in Dreams: On Tarantino, Violence, and Transcendence
Say what you will about his films, but Quentin is a consummate craftsman. This piece dives deep on how his use of violence has changed as he's gotten older. PDF version here.
Birdman, (a) Film of the Decade
It takes some serious confidence (maybe hubris is more accurate) as a critic to place a new release alongside the sacred cows. Remember when, in 1962, L'Avventura was voted by Sight and Sound as one of the ten best films of all time, only two years after it was made? And how right they turned out to be. Can you imagine a serious publication doing that now? Here I argue that Inarritu's Birdman is just such a piece. It's the new 8 1/2. It is a crowning achievement not just of the year, but of this quarter-century. I think it's an easy argument to make.
La La Land & What Los Angeles Means
More about my experience of Los Angeles, my hometown, and what the film inspires me toward. It's another world, that strange anomaly among American cities, and it doesn't apologize for itself.
Sicario: Why Visuals Matter
No director working now is so adept at such finely calibrated, brutal intensity as Denis Villeneuve. There is an atmosphere of menace oozing from every frame. That the opening establishes such a high barometer of dread, and that the film sustains in keeping us off-balance for the remainder of its runtime, is something I find both astonishing and extremely impressive. Why is it so impressive to me? Because it stems from a veritable bacchanalia of discipline. Craftwork. He, Deakins, editor Joe Walker and others, through their prodigious talent and highly considered choices, create brilliance with precision.
Gone Girl: on Fidelity and Subjectivity
If Fincher's Fight Club (1999) was about the disillusionment of males in a society that no longer has a place for them, Gone Girl is about marriage in a culture obsessed with facades. Both films are about myths; Gone Girl doesn't set out to decry marriage, but rather to offer a more clear picture. The myth of the perfect couple is peeled away, to no great surprise; but let us remember that the "battle of the sexes" concept is also a myth. What lies beneath manages to be more disturbing than the ramifications of either– the gradual subjugation of one's identity in the name of preserving something which only makes sense when seen from the outside, from a distance. Who do we choose to present to those we wish to seduce?
Gravity
Great films, like great literature, last because they are character-based. Peruse any list of the greatest films of all time; they are great not for their stories, but their explorations of human nature. When people talk about Citizen Kane or The Godfather, they don't discuss the story and "what happens next;" they talk about the characters and how they interact, and what we learn from watching them. The same is the case here.
Primary Colors with Music: Andrea Arnold's American Honey
Director Andrea Arnold's 162-minute magnum opus is gigantic and intimate, a highbrow portrait of lowbrow worlds, a work of startling compassion and stunning technical proficiency. Linklater's excellent Boyhood was a gentle, involving portrait of childhood over time; American Honey is rather an adrenaline shot in the arm, capturing the true, high-impact spirit of head-over-heels adolescence. It's Walt Whitman's Pioneers, O Pioneers brought to whirling, effervescent cinematic life.
The Martian: On Intelligence in Pop Culture
It's a significant pop cultural entity that is also a celebration of intelligence. The screenplay trusts we're going to be excited by complicated scientific solutions, dialogue scenes where knowledge and creative intellectualism is what carries the day. The picture ends on a note reinforcing the power of rational thought as the great and ever-available problem-solver for our lives. Wait a minute, you're thinking. When was the last time that ever happened?
About Elly
About Elly is not about politics, or plots, or monsters, or explosions, or even resolutions, but something much more complex: people. In 2009, most Americans didn't know who Asghar Farhadi, the director, was. Even the stuffy film literati of that year wouldn't have recognized the name. Farhadi had only made three previous features, one of which never made it past a few small European festivals– and I don't mean the ones we hear about, but tiny affairs in Denmark and the Czech Republic– while the other two films had blink-and-you'll-miss-it releases in France and Greece. If you were inside Iran, the government didn't want you knowing about the guy; if you were outside, well, you'd probably never heard of him anyway. Click the link for more.
A film can be as well-regarded as this one, and still underrated. A few notes on what makes Nolan's latest so special.
On Michael Mann's Heat
Everyone has a take on Mann's masterpiece. Here I focus on how the film illuminated to me, as a young viewer, the possibilities and validity of film as art.
On Tom McCarthy's Stillwater
A few words on why this picture so resonates, and why it’s so needed now.
The Lie & How to See It: On Hate, Despair & Hope in Contemporary Film
The year 2018 marked the first year when all productions released were greenlit after the 2016 election. A new breed of fatalism has spread into cinema. I explore the drawbacks of such a perspective here. PDF version here.
Sunset (Napszállta): a Reappraisal
An exploration into one of recent cinema's best, most challenging and most ignored works, and why the critical community ignored it.
Addressing Despair: Nathan on First Reformed
Here we go full-bore into Schrader's 2018 Bresson-inspired masterpiece, paying particular attention to its compositional sense and editorial choices, citing visual examples from Taxi Driver and the works of Andrea Arnold and Wes Anderson.
Burning
There's no other film like Lee Chang-Dong's masterpiece, which ought to have taken the Palme d'or in 2018.
On Paterson: A Bus Driver Reviews the New Bus Driver Movie!
How could I resist? How could I not be convinced Jarmusch and co. somehow knew abut me? A bus driver character who's a thin, brown-haired, brown-eyed man in his thirties (I think you know this age and body type are rare in our profession!), an artist, specifically one who translates his work experience into writing; who's amiable toward all, doesn't like smartphones or social media, takes pleasure in listening to passengers' conversations, and (like most operators too), is extremely comfortable interacting with all class and race backgrounds. Yeah. It's downright scary. Even down to the character's Persian girlfriend, which was once true for me, and his not exactly loving affinity for dogs. All joking aside, it's an affecting and deceptively simple picture that knows it doesn't need to be more than it is.
Once Upon a Time... in Dreams: On Tarantino, Violence, and Transcendence
Say what you will about his films, but Quentin is a consummate craftsman. This piece dives deep on how his use of violence has changed as he's gotten older. PDF version here.
Birdman, (a) Film of the Decade
It takes some serious confidence (maybe hubris is more accurate) as a critic to place a new release alongside the sacred cows. Remember when, in 1962, L'Avventura was voted by Sight and Sound as one of the ten best films of all time, only two years after it was made? And how right they turned out to be. Can you imagine a serious publication doing that now? Here I argue that Inarritu's Birdman is just such a piece. It's the new 8 1/2. It is a crowning achievement not just of the year, but of this quarter-century. I think it's an easy argument to make.
La La Land & What Los Angeles Means
More about my experience of Los Angeles, my hometown, and what the film inspires me toward. It's another world, that strange anomaly among American cities, and it doesn't apologize for itself.
Sicario: Why Visuals Matter
No director working now is so adept at such finely calibrated, brutal intensity as Denis Villeneuve. There is an atmosphere of menace oozing from every frame. That the opening establishes such a high barometer of dread, and that the film sustains in keeping us off-balance for the remainder of its runtime, is something I find both astonishing and extremely impressive. Why is it so impressive to me? Because it stems from a veritable bacchanalia of discipline. Craftwork. He, Deakins, editor Joe Walker and others, through their prodigious talent and highly considered choices, create brilliance with precision.
Gone Girl: on Fidelity and Subjectivity
If Fincher's Fight Club (1999) was about the disillusionment of males in a society that no longer has a place for them, Gone Girl is about marriage in a culture obsessed with facades. Both films are about myths; Gone Girl doesn't set out to decry marriage, but rather to offer a more clear picture. The myth of the perfect couple is peeled away, to no great surprise; but let us remember that the "battle of the sexes" concept is also a myth. What lies beneath manages to be more disturbing than the ramifications of either– the gradual subjugation of one's identity in the name of preserving something which only makes sense when seen from the outside, from a distance. Who do we choose to present to those we wish to seduce?
Gravity
Great films, like great literature, last because they are character-based. Peruse any list of the greatest films of all time; they are great not for their stories, but their explorations of human nature. When people talk about Citizen Kane or The Godfather, they don't discuss the story and "what happens next;" they talk about the characters and how they interact, and what we learn from watching them. The same is the case here.
Primary Colors with Music: Andrea Arnold's American Honey
Director Andrea Arnold's 162-minute magnum opus is gigantic and intimate, a highbrow portrait of lowbrow worlds, a work of startling compassion and stunning technical proficiency. Linklater's excellent Boyhood was a gentle, involving portrait of childhood over time; American Honey is rather an adrenaline shot in the arm, capturing the true, high-impact spirit of head-over-heels adolescence. It's Walt Whitman's Pioneers, O Pioneers brought to whirling, effervescent cinematic life.
The Martian: On Intelligence in Pop Culture
It's a significant pop cultural entity that is also a celebration of intelligence. The screenplay trusts we're going to be excited by complicated scientific solutions, dialogue scenes where knowledge and creative intellectualism is what carries the day. The picture ends on a note reinforcing the power of rational thought as the great and ever-available problem-solver for our lives. Wait a minute, you're thinking. When was the last time that ever happened?
About Elly
About Elly is not about politics, or plots, or monsters, or explosions, or even resolutions, but something much more complex: people. In 2009, most Americans didn't know who Asghar Farhadi, the director, was. Even the stuffy film literati of that year wouldn't have recognized the name. Farhadi had only made three previous features, one of which never made it past a few small European festivals– and I don't mean the ones we hear about, but tiny affairs in Denmark and the Czech Republic– while the other two films had blink-and-you'll-miss-it releases in France and Greece. If you were inside Iran, the government didn't want you knowing about the guy; if you were outside, well, you'd probably never heard of him anyway. Click the link for more.
