#12 -- About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, 2002) One of the cinematic stands that I've taken with some regularity is that Jack Nicholson is the finest actor who made film his primary medium. This argument carries more weight with those who hear his name and have automatic associations with his nineteen-seventies heyday of The Last Detail and Chinatown than it does with the movie fans ...
The Agronomist (Jonathan Demme, 2003). I greatly admire Demme's commitment to interspersing documentaries and other non-fiction offerings throughout his filmography, but I also need to sadly concede that this is not a strong effort. The film examine the life and contentious career of Jean Dominique , who operated a Haitian radio station committed to bringing information to the citizenry and ...
It is not a love story. Well, in a way it is, and it certainly has all of the trappings of one. An Education follows a schoolgirl named Jenny in nineteen-sixties London who encounters a charming older man, and begins spending time with him, drawn into the nightlife bustle of high-class cultural events and smoky, raucous jazz clubs. It's a lifestyle as far removed from her own as is ...
#13 -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) It is perhaps a marker of the diminished expectations of any film that is dominated and driven by action sequences that Ang Lee's involvement in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon initially seemed perplexing. Lee had made his mark with films that were about conversations rather than fisticuffs, films that were deeply invested in ...
So this is what Jewish fatalism looks like stretched out to feature length. The new film from Ethan and Joel Coen, A Serious Man , focuses on a college professor at the dawn of the nineteen-seventies, facing a tenure hearing and crumbling personal life. He's generally saddled with a dour parade of bad news, and the film is primarily about his increasingly frayed attempts to weather the ...
#14 -- Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) It is a love story, like a thousand movies than came before, and a thousand that will follow. It adheres to that most familiar of trajectories: two people meet, gradually fall into in one another's arms, and face impediments to being together. There are two potential paths to the closing credits, one ending in bliss, the other in tragedy. Despite...
Last week, I made oblique reference a pending entry in my survey of the top fifty films of the past decade. Specifically, I noted that I'd be writing about how my strong early reactions to one particular performer's work proved to be an inaccurate assessment of their talent. This led my old movie show colleague soul_shear , who probably knows my tastes about such things as well as ...
#15 -- American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) The past decade was a good time for deconstructed narrative in film. Beginning with the mad flush of creativity of the cinematic year 1999, when the likes of Being John Malkovich , Run Lola Run , Fight Club , and even marginally more conventional fare like The Matrix and The Sixth Sense , were as much about ...
Even though something else has been the Interweb musical flavor of the moment the past couple of days (and I have a well-established weakness for the creatures that populate said clip), I like a different viral video even more. (Due credit to Radio Exile , that's where I found it.)
