Viewing entries tagged
Toby Jones
Like Star Wars before it, the Indiana Jones franchise has escaped the hands of its original creators. What makes this fact notable is how aggressively this first – and perhaps last? – installment in the Indy saga without Steven Spielberg and George Lucas at the helm looks back to the franchise’s past. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny walks a fine line between honoring what’s come before it while forging a path ahead.
For the most part, it works.
You might be forgiven, especially considering Hollywood’s reputation, for expecting a movie titled Tetris to behave more like the 2012 screen adaptation of the popular board game Battleship and less like an intricately plotted spy picture, an 8-bit Bond. Thanks to Noah Pink’s tightly paced screenplay, Jon S. Baird’s crowd-pleasing direction, and a true story that the pair embellished in order to make it sing on the big screen, 8-bit Bond is what we get. Tetris is a raucous good time. It also has more on its mind than how seven geometric game pieces might fit together.
Writing in 2012 as chief film critic for British daily The Times, Kate Muir observed of Chariots of Fire, for its 30th anniversary re-release, that the Oscar Best Picture winner has “a simple, undiminished power,” and that it is “utterly compelling.” Chariots of Fire makes an appearance in a critical sequence in writer/director Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light. Set roughly between the fall of 1981 and the spring of 1982, Mendes’s film is a wonderfully realized character study following the lives of the employees at a seaside British cinema. In its own way, with more humble ambitions than the Olympian scope of Chariots of Fire, Empire of Light is also utterly compelling due to its own simple, undiminished power.
Set at the fictional Empire Cinema, Light mainly follows Hilary, a shift manager at the Empire, as well as the newly hired Stephen and the rest of the theater’s staff. A bond forms between the older Hilary and the younger Stephen, and the two engage in on-again/off-again sexual trysts. Over the course of the film, we discover that Hilary has been assigned her job by the government’s social services department. She struggles with mental health issues, possibly what would today be described as severe bipolar disorder.
Think of Kelly Reichardt’s new film First Cow as a spiritual cousin and companion piece to P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The films are about the American dream on the western frontier in the early 1800s (Cow) and the early 1900s (Blood). There Will Be Blood is about the American dream run amok on greed and unchecked success; it’s the story of an oil tycoon told on an epic scale. First Cow focuses on, essentially, a small business owner who goes out of business before ever striking it rich – if you’ve seen the film, you’ll get the irony of my putting it that way. It’s a tale of American entrepreneurial spirit on the smallest, most personal scale.
That’s not to suggest there are no dramatic stakes (pun intended) in First Cow. The contemplative pace of Reichardt’s film and the languorous nature of her camerawork both belie the story’s dramatic tension.
