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A Hidden Life
Have you ever watched a movie that hit you so squarely it left you without words? I don’t remember the last time I felt that way about a movie. I’ve watched some great films, but discussion seemed so natural and readily available almost before the credits began rolling. I have not hidden my personal sentiments…
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Oldboy (2003)
The 2003 film Oldboy (Oldeuboi), a Korean production directed by Park Chan-wook, is one of those disturbing explorations of humanity that leaves you with something akin to a post-Lynchian (good Lynch) hangover that lingers for several months after viewing (for context I saw the movie in September of 2018 and I am still processing it).…
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Mary Poppins Returns
The mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans, moviegoers. — Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism ‘What is the nature of the search?’ you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in…
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Mulholland Drive
David Lynch films tend to straddle and blur the line of reality; something like looking into a window with a strong reflection and losing track of what is on the other side of the glass and what is being reflected — all the while you are caught between the two worlds. Mulholland Drive embodies this…
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Apologia for Malick
Not that Terrence Malick needs a defense, but it seems that he has taken some heat from the forum of critics (including some of our own) as of late. This is understandable; Malick films tend to move against the grain of traditional narrative and shooting style. Anything we are unaccustomed to or unacquainted with, that…
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Genius
There is a tendency, in this human nature of ours, to distill a thing into what we consider its most fundamental. Sex becomes pleasure, knowledge becomes a recitation of facts, culture becomes equitable with skin color. These derivations all seem essential in some ways, but, through this distillation, we lose the whole and are left…
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Wes Anderson and the Either/Or
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Synecdoche, New York
The act of creation, if we are truly image bearers of the Divine, is deeply imprinted on our very being. Few films explore the consuming, and neurotic compulsion that is the creative process as deeply (and terrifyingly) as Synecdoche, New York. The 2002 Charlie Kaufman movie follows Caden Cotard, one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s most…
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Dead Poets Society
Poets, like prophets, are said to be guided by a muse, in some cases THE muse. In Ireland it was thought that poets, especially the great poets, folk healers, and others with knowledge beyond that of the common world were taken by the trouping faeries for seven years only to return gifted in their own…
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In Bruges
