Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me
"Yet even Lynch has a hard time getting the balance right. The film ends with a scene of Laura, now in the world beyond, weeping at the sight of a guardian angel resembling the one who earlier disappeared from a painting of children being watched over by a protective spirit. That disappearance happened at the same moment Laura realized nobody was protecting her. It’s a great example of Lynch’s ability to find power in banal, even kitschy imagery. But that scene arrives after images of a mouth devouring that supernatural creamed corn and a monkey saying “Judy,” the latter harkening back to an earlier moment in which the quickly reappearing and disappearing Agent Jeffries (David Bowie) announced he would not be talking about Judy. Is Lynch dropping a reference to be picked up in a sequel never to be made? Getting in one last joke by offering a cryptic clue never to be answered? Is the film just Lil, dancing before us with a sour face, and making us stupid trying to decipher it? Those looking for answers got only years of silence in return." -Keith Phipps
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Frances Ha
After spending the better part of a career making movies about faltering misanthropes, Noah Baumbach delivered the most upbeat film of his career with Frances Ha, thanks in large part to Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote and stars as a happy-go-lucky New Yorker struggling to master basic life skills. Over the past half-decade—heck, over the past two decades—American independent cinema has been overstocked with poignant comedies about quirky arrested adolescents, but Gerwig turns her Frances into more than just a collection of tics and flaws. She’s like everyone’s college best friend: a funny, chatty person whom everyone pities a little, though not enough to keep helping her out. Baumbach adjusts his style to fit his star, making a movie that feels like he just followed Gerwig’s Frances around the city (and elsewhere) for a year, so he could keep cutting to quick lines like, “I tried to make a frittata, but it’s really more of a scramble”— amusing fragments of dialogue that define the character. -Noel Murray
Astro City Vol. 3: Family Album
collects Astro City (Vol. 2) #1-3, originally published Jul 1996-Sep 1996 and #10-13, originally published Aug 1997-Dec 1997
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Monday, May 18, 2015
Twin Peaks Series Finale
writers: Mark Frost, Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, David Lynch (uncredited)
director: David Lynch
Astro City Vol. 2: Confession
collects Astro City (Vol. 2) #1/2, originally published Nov 1997, and #4-9, originally published Oct 1996-Mar 1997
Mad Men Series Finale
Episode Title: "Person to Person"
writer: Matthew Weiner
director: Matthew Weiner
Saturday, May 16, 2015
The Sun Also Rises (Audiobook)
read by William Hurt
on Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Daredevil: The Man Without Fear
collects Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, published Aug 1993-Dec 1993
#3 on CBR's list of best Daredevil comics
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
The Incredible Hulk
"Norton and Marvel publicly tussled over The Incredible Hulk's final cut, with Norton arguing for a longer, more character-focused film. But it's hard to see how a piece of greater depth could have emerged from material that hones in on and largely finds a zone of happy competence. It delivers the goods and waits for fans to sign the receipt." -Keith Phipps
Monday, May 11, 2015
21 Up
"'The child is father of the man,' Wordsworth wrote. That seems literally true as we look at these films. The 7-year-olds already reveal most of the elements, good and bad, that flower in later life. Sometimes there are surprises; a girl who is uptight and morose at 21, vowing never to marry, blossoms in the later films into a cheerful wife and mother." -Roger Ebert
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
"Generally speaking, the documentary is strongest when Morgen’s voice comes through the loudest, rather than Cobain’s. The first 30 minutes or so, set before Cobain grew up and pursued a more serious interest in music, are the film’s most affecting, because Morgen folds the beginning and the end of his life together so powerfully. While clips of Cobain and Love’s domestic life provide a fascinating look at their chaotic dynamic, as well as their relationship with the press and with their infant daughter Frances Bean, they don’t have the same associative punch. Nonetheless, Montage Of Heck is more than just a energetic tribute to a great, troubled artist—it’s an affirmation of film’s specific power to communicate more than words on a page ever could. It’s a visceral biography." -Scott Tobias
Saturday, May 9, 2015
What We Do In The Shadows
"Waititi and Clement bring to the material the same deadpan, straight-faced sensibility that paid such rich dividends in Flight Of The Conchords. What We Do In The Shadows also resonates as an eminently re-watchable hang-out movie, filled with characters, scenes, and gags worth revisiting, assuming audiences survive the dangerous but ultimately delightful company." -Nathan Rabin
Friday, May 8, 2015
7 Plus Seven
"[The Up Series] also strike me as an inspired, even noble, use of the film medium. No other art form can capture so well the look in an eye, the feeling in an expression, the thoughts that go unspoken between the words. To look at these films, as I have every seven years, is to meditate on the astonishing fact that man is the only animal that knows it lives in time." -Roger Ebert
Thursday, May 7, 2015
7 Up!
"Every seven years, the British director Michael Apted revisits a group of people whose lives he has been chronicling since they were children. As he chats with them about how things are going, his films pentrate to the central mystery of life, asking the same questions that Wim Wenders poses in "Wings of Desire": Why am I me and why not you? Why am I here and why not there?" - Roger Ebert
Monday, May 4, 2015
Life Itself
#6 on Dissolve's best films of 2014
"After multiple cancer surgeries left critic Roger Ebert disfigured and voiceless in the last years of his life, he not only refused to retreat from public life, he became more ferociously engaged than ever before. His memoir Life Itself reflected this renewed spirit, and Steve James’ documentary of the same name goes deeper still. The film alternates between contemporary scenes of Ebert and his wife Chaz spending time in and out of hospitals and rehab, and a look back at a life so full of adventure, it’d take a man with Ebert’s imagination to make it up. Life Itself takes a long, bittersweet look at a Chicago and newspaper world that has long since vanished, tackles Ebert’s alcoholism head-on, and offers a love story for the ages through Ebert’s soul-affirming marriage to Chaz. It’s a film of wit and uncommon candor that captures all the seasons of Ebert’s life, from the precocious college kid ruling the student newspaper to Ebert’s partnerships with Russ Meyer and Gene Siskel to his coronation as one of our most important and influential thinkers as a Pulitzer Prize winner. Candid, affectionate, and deeply moving, Life Itself is Ebert’s final gift to a world from which he both took and gave so much." -thedissolve.com
13 Assassins
"Though 13 Assassins’ setup could stand some tightening, it’s all necessary prelude to a spectacular, action-packed final hour where all hell breaks loose and the streets and rooftops flow with blood. Facing a severe disadvantage, with Inagaki’s hundreds against their 13, Yakusho and his men create some leverage through an ingenious series of booby traps and other elaborate feints. The mayhem that results isn’t a surprise from a filmmaker of Miike’s reputation—though he handles it with more aplomb than usual—but what is surprising about 13 Assassins is how far it goes in upending the samurai picture. In Miike’s mind, there’s nothing honorable about the thoughtless commitment to honor and code, especially if it means protecting dastardly men who don’t deserve that kind of loyalty. With 13 Assassins, he’s made a film both punk and moral." -Scott Tobias
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Holy Motors
“In this competition,” Cannes jury president Nanni Moretti said after awarding Amour the Palme D’or in 2012, “the filmmakers seemed more in love with their style than with their characters.” This, it was widely felt, was Moretti’s thinly veiled explanation for leaving Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, strongly favored during the festival to claim the top prize, without any award at all. It’s only been three years, but history has already proven Moretti wrong. Holy Motors is a dazzling film, and perhaps its radical sprawl was too much to take in amid the mad rush of Cannes. But from the present vantage, it seems clear that the film is no mere exercise in style. Carax confronts film’s demise with an intensity that in its own way fights valiantly against it, acknowledging the medium’s obsolescence while inarguably proving its worth. In part, that means adopting the language of new media: the fractured, drip-feed format of the YouTube video, flipped through like channel surfing, always poised to deliver another fix. At first blush, Holy Motors seems like a film with an identity crisis—a family drama one moment, a murder-mystery the next. On their own, the vignettes are sublime, each in turn an exhilarating bout of pure cinema. (A mid-film plunge into accordion-led rock opera, in particular, is among the most purely delightful sequences in recent film history.) But the cumulative effect is what counts. Death hangs over these proceedings, however occasionally ecstatic the register. It’s apparent from an early shot of an audience of corpses in the cinema that Holy Motors is concerned with the death of film. What emerges by the end is a deeper fixation: the death of us all. Mortality has never before been reckoned with so vigorously. —Calum Marsh
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