"I'd like to dedicate this to my grandpa, who showed me these moves."
I'd only seen Little Miss Sunshine once before, in the second semester of my senior year of high school. I was reeling from a pretty major setback in determining my major in college; I won't go into the gory details, but I was grappling with an enormous amount of insecurity, loss of identity, and imposter syndrome. Part of my means of escaping this was watching a bunch…
To celebrate my 26th birthday last week, I fit in some of my favorite movies. After rewatching The Awful Truth in the morning and dipping into the first fifteen minutes of The Social Network while taking a bath (very luxurious!), I managed to coerce a few friends to commit to remotely watching all three hours of this movie.
Listen. Fiddler on the Roof is my favorite musical. No other show moves me as deeply as this one. It cracks me…
I expected Hillbilly Elegy to be bad, but I don't think I expected it to be that bad.
I mean, where to start? Basically every inch of the film is miscalculated, from the pedestrian script to the obtrusive score to the overwrought performances. Amy Adams and Glenn Close give performances that are, as expected, the only worthwhile aspects of this mess, and even they can't save it from being a complete disaster. It's also not like they give performances that…
Not to be basic, but Nino Rota's theme for this is really gorgeous.
I'm a little surprised at how much I enjoyed this! Shakespeare movies always make me nervous, and Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet's reputation certainly precedes it at this point, so I was prepared to be underwhelmed. For the most part, I thought the tone was dead-on: the tragedy is brutal and devastating, but there are fleeting moments where the viewer is reminded that both of our leads are…
When The Departed came out, why was it cool to pretend that it was a minor Scorsese effort?
It's a fascinating film in the Scorsese canon for a number of reasons. It's got everything that makes a great one (bravura performances, his trademark kinetic direction, the frantic Thelma Schoonmaker editing, an impeccable soundtrack, top-notch writing littered with generous profanity), but with its fundamentally classical plot structure, it feels like it is of a different cloth than Goodfellas or Raging Bull…
Man, Anne Bancroft is something in this, isn't she?
Her performance can truly only be described as something of a tour-de-force. It's an outstanding testament to her skill, her focus as an actor. The dedication to physicality, the rich inner turmoil, the clarity and pain in her eyes. It's really tremendous. Pinter gives her an enormous challenge with the role but she succeeds beautifully. Opposite her is a strong Peter Finch, but make no mistake: it's Bancroft's world and we're just living in it.
