The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces the nominees for its awards this Thursday, so I wanted to get my predictions in. Too many pots bubbling over to bother with any kind of discussion, but do pipe up in comments if you just have to hear my logic about any of these things in particular. Best Picture The Big Short Bridge of Spies Carol Mad Max: Fury Road […]
The second-most irritating thing about The Big Short is how utterly facile it is. This adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2010 post-mortem of the 2007 collapse of the housing mortgage bubble that crashed the U.S. (and thence the world) economy, written by Adam McKay and Charles Randolph, and directed by McKay, functions first and above all as The Bro’s Guide to the Great Recession, using slick editing, snarky cutaways, and a […]
This review is dedicated to Father Chris J., whose dogged persistence in wanting me to review this movie has been incredible – and entirely justified, as I have finally learned. Beyond the Black Rainbow is the sort of film that makes one badly want to start listing out all its apparent influences and the other movies it’s copying from. Not as a way of proving that writer-director Panos Cosmatos’s solitary […]
The story of Moses and the exodus of the Hebrews from Pharaonic Egypt is, when you get right down to it, one of the key works of literary narrative in the entire history of the world, so there’s no reason a filmmaker shouldn’t poke at it. That’s what shared foundational texts are there for. So if e.g. Ridley Scott wants to make a movie based on Exodus that puts a […]
One of the things I have liked to think of as a great strength of Antagony & Ecstasy is the implacable pace of it: one goddamn review a day, every day, and two when I get the chance – three if I am a very good little boy. Which is why it pains me to have to state that things are going to be very erratic for the next several […]
Ask me three months ago, and I’d have said it was no surprise at all that Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit would be the best action movie starring Kevin Costner to be released in the first quarter of 2014. Ask me right after I saw Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and I’d have said it was a goddamn impossibility. But here we are, and 3 Days to Kill exists, and boy is […]
Shall we do this thing? Let’s do this thing. It’s the thing that American cinephiles get to do instead of caring about sports statistics, and I’ve had several weak years of predictions in a row, so I’m starting to get hungry to redeem myself. Best Picture12 Years a SlaveAmerican HustleCaptain PhillipsDallas Buyers ClubGravityHerNebraskaPhilomenaThe Wolf of Wall Street WON: 12 YEARS A SLAVEWill Win: 12 Years a SlaveSpoiler: GravityMy Pick: Gravity […]
Adams in! Hanks out! A kingly two nominations for the wonderful and gorgeously-appointed Inside Llewyn Davis! Since the whole thing is much pleasanter when you just treat it as a game, I’ll share my score: a dismal 88/122 (80/107 without the shorts; 37/44 on the Big 8). It was a hard year to predict, but not that hard. But seriously, two nominations for Inside Llewyn Davis is fucking bullshit. Picture12 […]
There’s an insurmountable argument to be made that, most of a year later, there’s no merit to kicking Movie 43 anymore. On the other hand, writing shell-shocked, visceral pans of fucking dreadful movies is fun, and it’s Christmas Day. So here’s my present to myself, and hopefully to you as well, my readers. God bless us, every one. Now, I have not seen every wide-release American film of 2013, but […]
I like to think it went this way: during the filming of Out of the Furnace, a bored Forest Whitaker and Christian Bale were goofing around on set, keeping themselves awake as actors do. And Whitaker decided to break out his impression of Bale’s over-the-top gravelly Batman voice while they were goofing around. Unfortunately this ended up being filmed and was an otherwise perfect take, and Whitaker was thus forced […]
American Hustle is set in the 1970s, and tells a vigorously fictionalised account of the ABSCAM sting set up by the FBI to target corrupt politicians in 1978, but it’s a ’60s movie. For despite its grittastic cinematography and the word “American” there in the title, both of them promising a neo-New Hollywood exercise in studying culture and people through a filter of grubby naturalism, the film’s heart belongs to […]
Just like that, the year is ending, and the last-minute releases are crammed in like shipping containers on an overloaded cargo ship. And by this point, from where I stand, most of the good stuff is already behind us. But not all of it. 6.12.2013 And just like that, we start off with the Coen brothers’ news movie, Inside Llewyn Davis. Along with many people, I tend to regard any […]
