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Tower
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Colossal
I recently had a discussion with the bearded genius, Tim Nelson, about Terrence Malick’s Song to Song. We circled around for an hour trying to get to the heart of the movie’s failures, and the thread we returned to again and again was story. We both felt Malick had abandoned narrative to his own peril,…
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The Landlord
“If you didn’t sweat so much nobody’d take you for a landlord,” Fanny (Diana Sands) tells Elgar (Beau Bridges). “You could pass for a human being.” Actually, The Landlord does pass for a human being, in how it says one thing, means another, thinks another, but all with a body language that doesn’t require translation.…
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Kong: Skull Island
A common complaint about cinema for the past few decades has been a lack of originality. “It’s always remakes! Why can’t anyone come up with a new idea,” says the hypothetical person in my head. I’m sure you’ve heard something similar frequently. And while this is an unfair claim for the most part — there…
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Song to Song
Chances are high that you haven’t seen Terrence Malick’s new film Song to Song. Few people have. It’s only grossed $421,856 since opening in limited release a month ago. The critical reception has been equally poor. Things weren’t always this way for Malick. Six years ago, he released The Tree of Life to universal acclaim…
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Logan
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Fences
During the 1950s Blacks were continuing the “Northern migration” from the Jim Crow oppression in the south to the northern states. Blacks felt that in the North at least some jobs were available to them without the overt segregation of the South. Those jobs were almost entirely of the menial variety with the understanding that…
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Life
It’s often stunning to think it’s been less than 60 years since man went into space — sorry conspiracy theorists. What’s less stunning is how space has since captured the imaginations of men and women across the world. Nowhere is that fascination more prevalent than on the silver screen. Hollywood’s love of space itself isn’t…
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Ghost in the Shell (1995)
In post-war Japan, rebuilding quickly meant embracing new technologies. Every decade brought more advancements and a deeper integration of burgeoning computer power. The high-tech future, always a part of Japanese popular imagination, became a source for hope, international competition, and national pride for a people still under the thumb of Western powers. In the 1980s Japan experience a…
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I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore
