Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Shutter Island
The style and manner of Shutter Island seems to leave the viewer with one of three reactions: a.) Exhaustion; b.) Elation; c.) Martin Scorsese, W.T.F.?! (The third option, admittedly, is not incompatible with the first two.) Where do I fall? Well, when I left the theater, neurons were firing like a blitzkrieg in my brain. [...]
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Thursday, August 27th, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
Quinten Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds is about as accurate to the Second World War as Kill Bill was to the present day, and while watching the movie I bought the conceit because this is Tarantino territory, and I was entertained. But, in retrospect, his revisionist history is offensive not so much because it’s dreadfully arrogant of [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Monday, August 17th, 2009
Forking Over “Spoon-Fed Cinema”
It’s not my custom to engage in this bloggiest of blog things to do, but I have to give kudos to my old mentor, A.O. Scott, for “Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema,” a sagacious diatribe he published in the New York Times last week. Here’s a taste…
What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet [...]
No Comments » - Posted in obiter dictum by elliott
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
Moon
Duncan Jones’s Moon rises high in the sky, but twinkles somewhat faintly. It borrows heavily from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. It’s a variation on common themes, but themes that may not be common enough. And, compared to the others, Moon is exceptionally modest [...]