essays
Paul Thomas Anderson may be 21st-century cinema’s best writer of complex male characters and the intrinsic and destructive nature of egotism, and his penchant for such characters, whether you agree with the superlative, infects 2017’s Phantom Thread, about a middle-aged dressmaker. . .
Starting with 2011’s Ghost Protocol, the Mission: Impossible films found a schtick in doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on the tension of elongated, elaborate, and escalating action set-pieces. The five films since and including that one form a bell curve that almost perfectly illustrates the franchise’s journey to balance tone (left of curve) and plot (right) around said schtick . . .
Like A Gentle Woman (1969), The Devil, Probably (1977) opens on (two contradictory reports of) the main character’s suicide, then jumps backward in time. At the 4-minute mark, at a gathering of students (which through context we can infer are an analog to “68ers”), a guy says into the mic, “I proclaim destruction. Everyone can destroy. It’s easy.” Sure enough, the next shots are of . . .
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Only the best can evoke the cycle of life and all its intricacies and broadness through a concentrated story of a single family. Yasujirō Ozu is one of the best, and Tokyo Story (1953) is maybe the greatest example in cinema of such a story, one of a relatively small number I’d argue . . .
The Italian neorealism movement rose from the ruins of WWII, and its characteristic pseudo-aimlessness was a powerful metaphor for life in the time of recovery. Without war recovery, the effect is mostly lost; the movement’s been dead for 70 years and a longshot for revival, especially in American cinema. The Florida Project (2017), from now-enshrined filmmaker Sean Baker . . .
Objectivity, in relation to art, cannot exist. Art is, in the most basic terms, an expression of an artist, and consequently subjective. However, the conceit of an “objective eye,” still technically a misnomer, can be illustrative of a genre of artist that supposes to present his or her subject(s) without explicit comment. Film and literature are especially conducive to this style because . . .