The new film adaptation of the 1957 stage musical West Side Story has an exceptionally high “why did you feel the need to make this” bar to clear. Because it’s also, in the public imagination if not in the most precisely literal sense, a remake of the 1961 film musical West Side Story, one of the handful of pre-’70s movies that remains a staple of normal people’s cinema viewing diet. […]
Movie awards shows always seem on the brink of extinction, at least as televised viewing. Non-comedian Millennial hosts, no hosts, format changes — nothing ever seems to make it that much different from previous years. Despite the forever ancient music, bored-as-hell hosts, and general sameness of it all, I always get pulled back in for a watch, though usually with less awe and more snark. Come with me as we […]
The mid-budget serious prestige drama has become an endangered species in 2010s cinema, we all know this. It’s a shame, but it has at least one positive benefit, which is that classic Oscarbait has become less common over the past few years. Oh, there are still the usual cradle-to-grave biopics and literary adaptations and Commentaries On The Issues, like there have been since the 1930s – and they even still […]
“Style over substance” is generally meant as a criticism, though not ’round these parts, not if I have anything to say about it. And I think, anyway, that if I call Baby Driver a particularly clear-cut example of style over substance, I am agreeing that the film turned out exactly the way writer-director Edgar Wright planned it. The idea behind the film, which he has been nurturing for literally decades, […]
Poor The Divergent Series. I mean it. You come into the world raring to be the new Hunger Games – made by the same studio no less, Lionsgate – with a new Hot Young “It” Actress to pin your hopes on, and then it’s all downhill after a kind of solid start. Eventually, you flare out so spectacularly – having done incommensurate damage to that same actress’s formerly promising career […]
The best thing that I could possibly will myself to say about Divergent is that it was by whatever thin margin the more watchable of 2014’s two virtually indistinguishable post-apocalyptic YA adaptations about the Enormously Special Snowflake whose pluck and to-heck-with-your-rules-man attitude helps to knock the legs out from underneath an inscrutable and preposterously contrived writerly conceit masquerading as a functional fantasy world, just besting The Maze Runner. And now […]
It’s burned into the genre that Fatal Illness Love Stories tell lies about fatal illnesses, and that’s just that. But it’s a hell of a lot more irritating when the story opens up by making an explicit, special claim for itself that this time, we’re going to get to hear the truth about what it means to be sick, and this is the first thing that happens in The Fault […]
