Tag Archive
Paperhouse
Don’t try to recapture your childhood. You’ll just end up watching The Goonies, grumbling, and muttering to yourself that you can’t believe you were such an easily entertained idiot. You also weren’t precocious, just irritating. Precocious is how adults describe children who annoy them, when they’re too polite to say so. My fear of disillusioning […]
He Never Meta Film Reference He Didn’t Like: A Review of Cop Out
The late, great film critic Pauline Kael wrote that “an homage is a plagiarism that your lawyer tells you is not actionable.” Where do you draw that line though? When does gentle chiding and affection turn into parody? Certainly a film like last year’s Black Dynamite made that difficult to determine; because, while it tried […]
The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
Over the past few years, director Tony Scott (Top Gun, True Romance, Enemy of the State) has been taking shots from the press over his recent fascination with film school tricks like flash frames, jump cuts, color filtering and his insistence on somehow cutting his films even faster than he used to. Whether this is […]
Collateral
Despite Michael Mann’s expertise on the film “look,” the HD video Collateral was shot on looks exquisite, and is just right for the material. If there was one thing I liked about Mann’s Ali, it was the fights, and the way they were photographed, an almost 3-D effect of being there. Mann manages to similarly […]