Older Films

The Lone Ranger: Gore Verbinski’s Unheralded Masterpiece

A similar dilemma faced those who watched Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger when it was released over 2013’s Fourth of July weekend. Was it stupid? Or just pretending to be stupid? Most critics and audiences subscribed to the former possibility. In fact, most people really, really hated The Lone Ranger. More than just stupid, they called it overlong, offensive, bloated, messy, disastrous, horrific, boring, and so on, with the hyperbolic amounts of vitriol further fueled by reports of the film’s extravagant budget. In the end, it was a financial and critical bomb, and seems to have singlehandedly destroyed Verbinski’s once-promising career in the same way the infamous 1980 flop Heaven’s Gate destroyed Michael Cimino’s, mere years after he was deemed a rising star due to the success of The Deer Hunter.
The Bourne Atheist: Ridley Scott’s New Soulless Cosmos

This ain’t no Sierra Club. This ain’t no National Geographic Society neither. “Fuck you, Mars,” says Martian Mark Watney shortly after finding himself utterly alone on a foreign planet. Man has been set against nature many times before, especially in 20th century literature and film. At times, man must battle nature. The Old Man must […]
Where’s That Olde Time Religion? The Force Awakens

I suspect I am not unique in claiming to have had serious conversations with friends in the wee hours of the morning wherein real considerations of future plans have been hashed out using the original Star Wars trilogy as a template for a genuine pursuit of truth and goodness. Should I find a Yoda under […]
My Life With The Chill Kill Cult: Martha Marcy May Marlene

Where do flashbacks come from? Who delivers the flashback to the audience? Is it the same authorial power which delivers the present tense narrative to the audience? And who is privy to the flashback? If the flashback occurs in the mind of a present character, should the flashback be trusted less than the objectively rendered […]
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Left Behind: A Good Premise for a Lousy Movie

Blessed be Netflix, that magical website which allows one to watch terrible movies without feeling guilty about paying for it. After all, you already dished out $8 for the month. The only problem is that sometimes the movies aren’t just bad. They are horrid. Left Behind is a perfect illustration. One will, no doubt, walk […]
Control

I once spent an afternoon on Babblefish, inputting English song lyrics, translating them into other languages, then translating them back into English to see how they’d changed. Something hidden but true might be discovered within the English that would only come to light when the English was subjected to the grammatical rules of another language. […]
The Enduring Brilliance of The Office: We Are All David Brent Now

A scene in The Office Christmas Special nearly gives David Brent away. Or rather, David Brent comes closer than usual to giving himself away. The Christmas Special is set three years after the conclusion of The Office and plays catch-up with faces made famous by the BBC2 documentary series. David has been made redundant, won a […]
Charlotte’s Web (1973)

In the world of trigger warnings, where one needs to wear kid gloves just to touch the kid gloves, the old 1973 animated adaptation of Charlotte’s Web is a relief. I see recent children’s movies from time to time, and I know that beloved characters still die, but nothing in kid’s movies of late rivals the […]
Good Kill: The Banality Of Slaughter?

“It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it,” says Robert E. Lee. Most veterans, from the Bunker Hill to Afghanistan, would agree with this statement. But what happens if war ceases to be so terrible? This is the question at the center of Good Kill, the latest from […]
Welcome To The Good Life: Italy Unpacked

As a classics teacher, “What’s Italy like?” is a question I can answer with a reasonable degree of certainty, provided you want to know what Italy was like hundreds of years ago. However, there is a vast chasm between “What’s Italy like?” and “What’s Italy like in the summer?” and the answer to the first […]
Lost, Season One: Strangers On A Plane

More than ten years since it began and more than five years since it ended, I have begun a grand revisitation of Lost. When I first began the show, I had just married and was still in school. I wasn’t much of a reader during my first encounter. I understood that many of the characters […]
In Bruges

Early in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell), two Irish hitmen, are standing in a museum, contemplating a painting of the Last Judgment. Ray describes purgatory as “the in-betweeny one – you weren’t really shit, but you weren’t all that great either” – but the humor of the description belies […]
Cinderella: Unenlightened And Loving It

In the last ten years, the Disney Corporation has broken the heads off more than a few statues they carved back in the 50s and 60s. Given that the company made their billions entertaining children, and given that Americans in no wise view children as they did when your grandparents were kids, such image smashing […]
The Importance of Being Poppy : Happy-Go-Lucky

The opening scene of Mike Leigh’s shamefully overlooked Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) is a master class in establishing a character. Poppy, one of the great female characters in cinema, is introduced riding her bike. Her course is a wobbly wheeled delight, she’s dressed eccentrically and smiles frequently, but what is most noticeable is her full-eyed wonder, her […]
Rich Hill: A Look at Poverty Before It was a Statistic

Before the collapse of industrial empires like Detroit, there was rural America. And rural poverty has been forgotten for much longer than the most excessive architectural subjects of ruin pornography have existed. Andrew Droz Palmero and Tracy Droz Targos’s Sundance documentary, Rich Hill, is a reminder of a whole culture that is rarely found in […]
Chantal Akerman’s News From Home

I write this on a train, returning home after four days in New York City. In the last five years, I have toured three high school classes through the Metropolitan, the Cloisters, and the smaller museums of Manhattan, like the Morgan and the Frick. While El Greco and Fra Angelico’s Adoration scenes are true and […]
Defying The Elder Zosima: Going Clear

Before Orthodox Christians receive the Eucharist, they confess, “Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies, neither like Judas will I give Thee a kiss; but like the thief will I confess Thee: Remember me, O Lord in […]
Mercy Rule: Ice Cream For Your Darlings

Praising Mercy Rule for what it doesn’t get wrong is a fairly straight forward task. Praising the film for what it gets right is a bit trickier. As with most “Christian films,” Mercy Rule was shot on a small budget and with few recognizable faces, though the film lacks an altar call, a conversion and […]
The Americans: The Best Show on Television

The German philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in effort to show the pervasiveness of Christ’s Crucifixion in culture and as an axiom in social life, used the “Cross of Reality” to describe the suffering at the center of human experience. An actual Cross is key, not just as a symbol of anguish, but in form. Life does […]
What Kind Of A Man Are You?

Speaking of his wife and her brawny boss who is over for dinner, small town barber Ed Crane looks at the two flirting in his kitchen and remarks dryly to us, “I guess Doris liked all that he-man stuff. Sometimes I had the feeling that she and Big Dave were a lot closer than they […]