Tobacco Road is a bizarre, schizophrenic little bit of a movie. Coming at a place in John Ford’s canon right after The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home, and right before How Green Was My Valley and his war-related hiatus from studio filmmaking, Tobacco Road would seem to fit comfortably in that line […]
Four years after arriving at Fox with Just Pals, Jack Ford had begun to call himself “John,” to go along with the much more serious dramas that he’d begun directing for William Fox. The young director, not yet thirty years old, was on the very verge of greatness, and the studio mogul started to formulate […]
When the January film doldrums hit and there’s just nothing to see, I’ve made sort of a habit, or at least this year makes it a habit, of filling the cold winter nights with whatever sexy box set I got for my birthday/Christmas. This year, that role has been oh-so-ably filled by the magnificent (and […]
A beginning, an ending: the first American release of 2008, One Missed Call is, at least this is my hope, the last spasm of the dead corpse of J-Horror remakes. Or maybe not. But no matter, it’s a derivative and clumsy thing that surely means the end is near, for no genre capable of crapping […]
It’s not an eternal question, but it ought to be: if a non-fiction film treats on a fascinating and poorly-understood topic, but it does so clumsily and without the least pretense to creativity, is it a success or a failure? I was mostly recently confronted with this dilemma upon seeing The Rape of Europa, which […]
My intent had been to start out this project with the highest-ranked film on the TSPDT list that I’ve never seen, but #64, Erich von Stroheim’s epic Greed, is not presently available on DVD, and I have no access to a videocassette player. So I’ve had to go for a back-up: the second-highest-ranked film that […]
I don’t want to use P.T. Anderson’s newest film to beat up on his old films, but I did want to mention a striking pattern of diminishing returns that I’ve experienced with the director: I very much like all of Hard Eight and I love some of it, I really like the first half of […]
There’s a peculiar flatness to The Orphanage, sort of a half-finished feeling like everyone involved knew what the Themes and Meanings of the film were supposed to be, but just stubbed it in and saved the hard work for another day. I have absolutely no doubt that the film is “about” the fears of being […]
There was no way that Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem could possibly be as bad as the first Alien vs. Predator. Not only was Paul W.S. Anderson out of the picture, the psychotic mythology about adolescent predator aliens (of the classic Predator and the not-classic Predator 2) hunting slimy black aliens (of the increasingly debased Alien […]
Here’s the crazy thing about Charlie Wilson’s War: I liked it, in fact I liked it quite a lot, and all I can think to talk about is its flaws. The chief among those flaws is probably that it’s a film about the history of the United States’ intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s and […]
