Fairly early in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary At Berkeley – “fairly” early in that the usual rules about duration in the context of a 4 hour and 4 minute movie need to be seriously re-evaluated – a UC-Berkeley undergraduate offers up the suggestion that in the past, college students were more motivated by having opportunities to […]
Let’s get this out of the way right now: Free Birds is fucking awful. It is everything wrong with contemporary family filmmaking and mainstream American animation bottled up in 91 minutes of pure market-driven soulless plasticine trash. If not for one performance much better than the screenplay deserves, and some interestingly nonsensical character design, there’d […]
My overwhelming reaction to Toho’s 1958 kaiju one-off Varan is to ask, in a variety of whiny voices, why? Why, two years after the glitzy Eastmancolor of Rodan, is it in such ratty-looking black and white? Why is the titular monster’s roar cribbed so shameless from the iconic Godzilla roar? Why bother telling what amounts […]
It’s nothing less than shocking that Ender’s Game any is good at all. Stuck in development hell for something like three generations of fans of the Orson Scott Card novel from 1985 to grow out of its target audience, and finally given the breath of life by a writer-director as dubious as Gavin Hood (of […]
It’s not absolutely perfect – and who the heck wants a completely perfect movie, anyway, they leave nothing to talk about – but even better, The Act of Killing is the most unique and essential movie I have seen in 2013. It is maybe the only thing I have seen this year about which I […]
The third daikaiju eiga made by Toho Films in as many years, 1956’s Rodan marks a decisive graduation in the subgenre’s fate.1954’s Godzilla was a prestigious, impressive film, but its sequel, Godzilla Raids Again, was decidedly not – it was a cheap little quickie designed to cash in on kaiju mania RIGHT NOW. And as […]
The blogger having been an unusually lazy homebody this year, Antagony & Ecstasy’s annual marathon of movies we missed out on during their theatrical release shall begin extra-early this year. And what better place to start my catalogue of the movies I missed in 2013 than with the very first movie I missed in 2013, […]
While Godzilla was Toho’s most expensive film of 1954, it was also the studio’s highest-grossing film of 1954, and that meant the same thing in a reconstructing Japan as it means in 21st Century America: sequel! I can’t think of anything to say about Godzilla Raids Again that is more telling than this one fact: […]
Nearly-retired British couple vacations to Paris, finds out that she barely tolerates him and he only loves her out of the crippling fear of being isolated. Brought to you by the director of Hyde Park on Hudson. Everything on paper makes Le Week-End sound beyond endurance, but it surprisingly turns out to be extremely solid, […]
The primary characteristic of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, it has seemed to me, is terseness. His plots and scenes come along bluntly and quickly, like a swift punch to the windpipe, his characters speak barely at all, and frequently only state absolutely essential facts when they do. So why, oh why, is The Counselor, McCarthy’s first […]
