8 years ago
Longform (10 posts found)
Modernly Retro: “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” Updates the Past for the Present
Contrary to what so-called “scientists” might claim, the past is not a static thing. It’s changing all the time, and not just because Google’s new Alphabet rigamarole is a cover-up for the debut of commercially available time travel. The past exists only insof...
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You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Noah Baumbach’s Trilogy of Disappointment
Gracing the cover of the most recent issue of Film Comment are Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke, staring into one another’s eyes, just under the headline, “Mistress America: I’ll Be Your Mirror.” The photograph, taken from a scene in which the trajectory of both ch...
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Stop-Motion Animation Is Dying, But It Still Matters
Roughly a decade ago, the world of animation was nearly dealt a serious blow in the form of a fire destroying over three decades of archival work from Aardman Animations. This stop-motion studio is best known for creating the unflappable duo of Wallace and Gro...
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Streets, Studios, and Stages: The Music Videos of Jonathan Demme
In the opening seconds of Jonathan Demme’s music video for The Feelies’ song “Away,” the camera moves slowly around the band, as they begin the song’s soft, dreamy intro. Then “Away” begins in earnest: The Feelies’ two guitarists strum and slide smoothly over ...
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Productive Failure: Three New Films Allow Female Characters to Fail
Like the Pacific Theater in World War II, America’s literal movie theaters have become the site of crucial battles in the cultural war for womankind’s dignity and agency. With every new month’s slate of releases, we get a wave or two of incisive assessments ov...
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We Were Once A Fairytale: On The Fantastic Four
The story of the Fantastic Four is essentially the story of Icarus. In the ancient version, a young man gifted with wings bound in wax ignores his father’s warnings about straying too close to the sun and plummets into the sea in a rain of melted wax. The Fant...
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The Sensitive Frivolity of “Metropolitan”
Late in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress, the director’s long-awaited followup to 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, Gatsby-esque self-inventor Violet (Greta Gerwig) takes in a curiously signposting lecture on the dandy tradition in literature. The professor ca...
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The Cult of Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise imbues every performance with an exciting amount of personality and charisma. There is no one more fun to watch onscreen on a consistent basis. Yet the world remembers: He still jumped on Oprah’s couch.
Despite a prolific career, years of apologizi...
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Brando vs. Brando: Dueling Visions Of The Icon
Was latter-day Marlon Brando the corpulent madman of myth, or a visionary genius who’d already moved on to the next level of movie acting? While the perception of the 20th century’s most famous actor as a paycheck-cashing recluse in his later years endures in ...
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Is “Pixels” The Worst Rom-Com of All Time?
This just in: Pixels, the latest half-hearted cinematic time-killer starring the sad sack once known as Adam Sandler, is bad. It is bad, bad, bad. The script adheres to no sense of internal logic; the film expects audiences to accept that Paul Blart, Mall Cop ...
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