It all started with an innocent enough question from my wife. She had no way of knowing when she asked it that the answer would lead to the both of us falling down a rabbit hole of cinema. (She’s been with her movie-obsessed partner long enough, though, to know that’s always a possibility. She knew who she was marrying!)
The two of us are always on the lookout for new shows we think the other would enjoy and that we can watch and discuss as we work our way through it together. Last fall, she mentioned a title she had been seeing on HBO Max for a few months – soulless media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which now owns HBO, recently rebranded the streaming service to the obnoxiously titled Max.
“Do you know anything about this Irma Vep?”
Read more…
The Green Knight is the most visually stunning picture of the year so far. Director David Lowery’s retelling of the famous Arthurian tale is a brilliant mix of fidelity to the original story and inspired tweaks by Lowery, who also wrote the screenplay. As with his 2017 film, A Ghost Story, Lowery showcases his well-honed ability to set an otherworldly mood and to take the viewer on an unexpected trip.
Read more…
The Julie Taymor who directed the electric films Titus, Frida, and, yes, even Across the Universe – a movie which wasn’t well received by most critics, but which really worked for me – shows up a little over an hour into her latest effort, The Glorias, the biopic about journalist and activist Gloria Steinem.
There are Taymor flourishes in the meandering first 70 minutes of the picture, to be sure. The film opens with a sequence in which an older version of Steinem – four actresses play the iconic feminist throughout The Glorias – looks out the window of a Greyhound bus as it rolls along the highway. Steinem and everything inside the bus are in black and white, everything outside the bus is in full color. It sets an interesting aesthetic that doesn’t pay off until Steinem finds her fiery passion for the Women’s Liberation movement. That’s when the movie really starts to rip.
Read more…
There isn’t an ounce of flab on Matt Damon’s body. The same can’t be said of the latest installment in the Bourne series. Damon is reprising his role as Jason Bourne, the memory-deficient super spy, after a nine-year hiatus in which Universal Pictures attempted to expand the franchise with Jeremy Renner in 2012’s The Bourne Legacy.
The main problem with this series is that each movie essentially tells the same story. After suffering amnesia during an assignment-gone-wrong in the first movie, Jason Bourne becomes a spy that is forever trying to piece together his own past. In each successive picture, Bourne gets a new clue about the secretive program that turned him into an elite assassin. The saving grace of the Bourne movies is the tightly wound structure of each mystery. The plot always takes a back seat to the chase, as the CIA desperately tries to stop Bourne from revealing the disturbing truth he uncovers about the secret program that created him. In Jason Bourne, there’s frankly too much plot, and it detracts from the action.
Read more...
