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Filtering by Category: movies
As has been the story of my life for the whole of July after Independence Day every year since 2010, I am hip deep in Capital Fringe Festival coverage for Fringeworthy, the Washington City Paper's CapFringe blog. But I took some time out to review A Brony Tale, a documentary about the organized, adult fandom of the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, for The Dissolve.
In honor of the historic 25th anniversary of the release of Lethal Weapon 2, give or take a couple of days -- no, that's not actually why I did this -- I elucidated the agonizing process of logrolling and negotiating required for me to determine my votes in The Dissolve's list of the 50 greatest summer blockbusters in this essay for NPR Monkey See.
Sometimes you need the Socratic Method and math to discover you're dead inside.
Valentina de Angelis and Nicola Peltz in Affluenza. I could barely tell them apart.
I reviewed the unenlightening spiritual-poverty-among-one-percenters melodrama Affluenza for The Dissolve. The movie is set just prior to the 2008 financial crisis, which is uses as a backdrop for its lame love triangle plot. You could read a couple or three chapters of Michael Lewis' The Big Short with your 85 minutes instead. Or just watch some soaps.
It's only July 1, but thanks to the ever-accelerating start date of the summer movie season -- it kicked off the first weekend of April this year, when Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out -- summer movies are done. I still want to see Snowpiercer, which will roll out to Washington, DC this week, but the less-than-enthusiastic early notices from critics I respect has tempered my enthusiasm for that. There's no Dark Knight coming in two weeks. There's no Terminator 2: Judgment Day opening at midnight tomorrow night. Does that sadden me? It does, a little! Shut up.
Anyway, I was honored to be one of a dozen critics who determined -- through three rounds of voting -- the 50 Greatest Summer Blockbusters for The Dissolve. Numbers 50-31 were posted yesterday; 30-11 went up today. Tomorrow you'll all find out what we deemed the Top Ten.
I had the honor of writing the entires for three of my favorites: Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, from 2002, which placed 46th; Nic Meyer's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, from 1982, which placed 37th; and at lucky no. 13, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which is probably my personal all-time favorite summer movie. (I still love you, Jaws, but so does everyone else, and you arrived before I did. Whereas I had the experience of discovering T2's greatness at the same as the rest of the world.)
The process of choosing our 50 from the initial list of 655, I think it was, was fairly agonizing. Like any exercise is winnowing, it forces you to examine your priorities in art. I'll probably try to write about that this week. UPDATE: I did write about it.
Danny Cheng, M.D., Dave Pomeranz, M.D., Ryan McGarry, M.D., and Billy Mallon, M.D. in McGarry's documentary Code Black.
My review of physician Ryan McGarry's documentary Code Black is up today at The Dissolve.
This was one of those instances when what you already know about a subject can color your perception of a film. An ex-girlfriend of mine is a physician who did her residency at a country medical center 65 miles west of the one documented in Code Black, and we lived together during those years, 2000-2003. She was at the hospital all the time, and I became well acquainted with her classmates, who were exactly like the young doctors whose voices McGarry features: idealistic, accomplished, adventurous, easily bored. Many of them had done other things before medical school, like working on a fishing boat in Alaska or spending a few years as a forest firefighter. One of them was a nun who swore more crudely than any Marine I’ve ever met. They were all friendly, and I found them all intimidating. I was in awe of them.
We’d met when I was working as an editor for the American Medical Student Association’s magazine. AMSA was lobbying hard for a single-payer healthcare system in those days.
After that, I earned my living for many years writing proposals for several health-care companies. So I am very familiar with their rhetoric about how patient care is what matters most to them -- and with the reality that their shareholders are the only people they really care about.
It's always a thrill to be invited back on Pop Culture Happy Hour. I joined Linda, Stephen, and Glen to talk about Edge of Tomorrow -- the best would-be summer blockbuster yet in a year that's already seen several strong ones -- and noble failures. We agreed on the B topic before Edge of Tomorrow opened to less-than-stellar business, despite near-universal acclaim from critics. I hope we didn't jinx it, because this is exactly the kind of shrewd, fresh, self-aware big movie that seems to be perennially in danger of extinction.
I'd been summoned to PCHH this time at least in part because of my enduring affection for the 1991 caper comedy/Bruce Willis vanity project Hudson Hawk. This is, to my mind, a creatively successful film that also just happened to lose something north of $50 million in 1991 dollars.
I always over-prepare when I'm invited on a podcast. I came in ready to talk about a few other movies big genre films whose reach exceeded their grasp: Kathryn Bigelow's ambitious social sci-fi Strange Days, Bryan Singer's way-emo Superman Returns (to which Man of Steel's shrugging, genocidal violence was, I'm convinced, a direct, and stupid, reaction), and Alien 3, the fascinating, troubled sequel that marked David Fincher's feature debut and that he refuses to talk about to this day. Of those three, only Strange Days was a big money-loser like Hudson Hawk was; the other two did okay but fell short of their aesthetic objectives.
Anyway, we didn't get to any of those. I'd even jotted down a quote from Roger Ebert's four-star review of Strange Days to read on the air. Having come from a screening of Steve James' wonderful documentary Life Itself -- about Ebert's life, career, illness, and death -- just hours ago as I'm typing this, I'm doubly sorry I didn't get to. We didn't even get to everything I meant to say about Hudson Hawk. Hey, it's a discussion, not a lecture.
I'll correct one of those omissions right here: One of Hudson Hawk's villains, Caesar Mario, is a guy who had a chip on his shoulder because he's the lesser-known brother of a more famous gangster. This character is played by Frank Stallone. That's a good casting joke, there.
Recorded but cut for time was an acknowledgment -- initiated, would you believe, not by me but by my Pal-for-Life Glen -- about Edge of Tomorrow's homages to ALIENS both large and small, from the armored power suits to the gender-neutral division of action-hero labors between stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, to the presence of Bill Paxton, doing a hilarious 180-degree inversion of Private Hudson, his panicked, "Game over, Man!" Marine from ALIENS.
Also cut was my observation that I'm pretty sure this is the first time a live-action summer blockbuster has won the approval of the full PCHH panel in almost four years of this show. The only other one I can remember coming close was J.J. Abrams' Super 8, which only Glen disliked.
In 2011.
Listen above or listen here.
FURTHER READING: I wrote about Edge of Tomorrow and blockbuster fatigue, and about PG-13 vs. R-rated cine-violence, and about how seeing ALIENS on VHS 400 times as a kid set up expectations that the 2012 ALIEN prequel Prometheus could not possibly satisfy.
Jocelyn Towne in I Am I, an amnesia drama she wrote and directed.
My review of Jocelyn Towne's amnesia drama I Am I is up at The Dissolve today.
Ugh.
My review of the low-budget horror movie The Human Race is up on The Dissolve. It's wretched, but I tried to write a fun piece about it.
Anyway, here's the 1987 Mick Jagger video I cite as one of this uninspired film's obvious inspirations.
