Damn Fine TV/Film
“I love the Lord and all his black people.” This is what Spence (Bill Duke) makes anyone around him say when they allude to slavery, particularly in the context of basketball---that he, as a coach, is “cracking the whip,” for example. It’s a line that thus runs through High Flying Bird and is heard in …
Continue reading "A Netflix Original Film: High Flying Bird"
Paterson screened in cinemas in late 2016. I remember this distinctly because I saw the posters plastered all over the London underground. They seemed unusual to me, Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani curled into each other on a rumpled bed, and it seemed wonderfully simple and quiet. I didn’t catch it in the cinemas, but when …
The core representatives of two of the most critically acclaimed films of 2018 are set to team up in the ever-expanding (and always-spending) Netflix universe. As reported by Variety on February 12th, Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman is in negotiations to star in BlackkKlansman director Spike Lee's next film, titled Da 5 Bloods, which itself is in …
Continue reading "Chadwick Boseman and Spike Lee To Join Forces"
I was too young to see Muriel's Wedding at the cinema on its initial release but I remember sitting down with my mum a year or so later when it premiered on UK TV screens and I knew instantly that I was watching something special. It would be easy to describe this movie as a …
Continue reading "Film25YL: Gabby Millgate Discusses Muriel’s Wedding"
Those waiting for Martin Scorsese's next crime epic might finally be able to circle a date on the calendar. The Irishman, the long-gestating period piece set at least partly in the '70s, follows Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, a union leader turned mobster, and his potential involvement in the disappearance of fellow union leader Jimmy Hoffa …
Continue reading "Martin Scorsese’s “Risky” The Irishman Inches Closer to Release"
How do we live, and why? Certain words take on incredible depth when they are strung together. Those same words have been the focus of Michael Haneke's career since his debut film and continued through his 1994 film, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is another profoundly …
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Art is objective. One man's trash is another man's treasure, but yet in a weird, meta way does the fact that I'm really finding it hard to big up Velvet Buzzsaw perhaps mean I'm just like any of the awful, pretentious characters in this film? Why didn't I like this film that I am seeing mostly …
Continue reading "Velvet Buzzsaw Slashes & Satires the Art World, but Lacks in Scares"
Sometimes what makes a cult film a classic is exactly how awful it is. A film can’t become cult without an (often dubious) reputation so sometimes, in retrospect, the qualities that make a film bad are also the reasons it is good. Look, Buried Treasures is a way for us to defend those that …
By 1994, Tim Burton had already cemented his place as a director of whimsical and gothic spectacle. When we shopped with Pee-Wee at Mario’s Magic Shop in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), we had in essence already shopped through shelves of inspiration for many of Burton’s favorite set props: the recurring swirl of the X-Ray specs, …
It has been 13 hours since I viewed the movie Polar and I’m not sure where I am or what is going on. The movie just would not sit still not for any reason. Quick cuts, words flashing across the screen, fast and vicious action scenes which were all played for laughs. Right folks …