The Dissolve

“Turning the entire debate into, ‘I’m 30, and I was scared by something at age 5, but I came out fine’ is entirely discounting what it feels like to be scared as a kid, or what it’s like as a parent to be helpless in the face of a child’s irrational terror. The question isn’t whether watching Aliens as an 11-year-old is going to irreparably destroy someone’s life, forcing them to be institutionalized and tranquilized until their untimely Aliens-induced suicide. Like so many other questions about child-rearing, it’s about what’s right for individuals in the moment, and who gets to make those choices.”

“Brody attacks even his lowest roles with self-seriousness and commitment. He isn’t phoning it in; it’s as though the man doesn’t even own a phone. As Flirty Harry [in the transcendently terrible inAPPropriate Comedy], Brody wrings every last bit of smoldering homoeroticism from his lines. He isn’t lisping or gesticulating wildly. The material is hugely offensive, but his performance isn’t. He’s given thought to who Flirty Harry is, what motivates him in life, and why he feels compelled to speak entirely in super-gay double entendres. ... Watching Brody play Flirty Harry, it’s easy to see a talented actor operating at the height of his powers to slightly elevate astonishingly stupid material. This is a rare phenomenon, but when it happens, it’s beautiful. Brody knows this.” [...]

A funny thing happened during this awards season. After nabbing so many critics-circle awards early on, as well as the Golden Globe for best drama, Boyhood started to look like a frontrunner instead of an underdog. Once Birdman began to pick up momentum late in the race, Boyhood fell back into its natural position as a truly independent gem going up against a movie with a more experienced Oscar-campaigning studio behind it, and a lot more famous actors to advocate for its relevance. That’s one of the reasons I was rooting for Boyhood; in a year where there wasn’t a clear favorite for Best Picture, it would have been nice to see Hollywood honor a little film that could, one made on a very modest budget, and whose primary goal was nothing more grandiose than to reflect the everyday messiness of a kid completing the journey from 6 to 18. [Read more...]

"To create [Escape From New York's] collapsed metropolis, [John] Carpenter worked on Los Angeles soundstages, the Atlanta airport (for a sequence that didn’t make it into the film), and on the streets of East St. Louis, which had fallen on hard times by the early 1980s, with whole blocks that had yet to be rebuilt after a fire. It looks enough like New York to pass, but Escape From New York is less about a possible future for real-world New York than the apotheosis of the dystopian New York of 1970s movies. Born in  New York but raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Carpenter relocated to Los Angeles and enrolled in (then later dropped out of) University of Southern California. He came to Escape From New York as an outsider looking in, primarily through movies." [Read more...]

“What if there was a place for movies where nothing was impossible? A place where veteran auteurs shared the spotlight with first-time directors? Where diversity of voices was of the highest importance, rather than the lowest? Where budget size didn’t matter, and every topic, big or small, was covered with the same attention to detail? Where films could actually change the world?

This place already exists, and it has for decades. It isn’t Tomorrowland. It’s the PBS documentary showcase made up of the nonfiction anthology series POV and Independent Lens. And it’s slowly dying.”

“[Fritz] Lang embraces strange perspectives—visual, metaphorical, and narrative—from his opening shot, which looks down from a crane’s-eye view on children playing a grisly game inspired by the murderer. Over and over throughout M, he finds inventive ways to visually frame the action. He looks up into Lohmann’s sprawling belly and bulging crotch from a low angle under his desk. He peeks around corners with the hunters watching Hans. He watches Hans’ latest target in a shop-window reflection, while framing Hans’ haunted face in the same window. He peers down through a hole in the floor to find one of Hans’ pursuers, abandoned by his compatriots at the factory, or pitilessly watches Hans from high overhead as the criminals cut off his avenues of escape on an empty street. The whole film is a hunt for a murderer, and Lang’s voyeuristic camera is part of the hunt: The oddball angles make it impossible to forget where the camera is located, giving the sense that it isn’t an objective observer, so much as a spy constantly lurking, sneaking, and prying.” [Read more...]

The 50 best films of the decade so far

In the bit roles that littered the early years of his career, Hoffman all but lunged for the camera with wild-eyed abandon. But he was brilliant and charismatic enough to ensure that enjoyment was both justly merited and shared by the audience. Take Hoffman’s first collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson in 1996’s Hard Eight. Though billed only as “Young Craps Player,” he delivers the kind of performance that demands attention. Clad in an airbrushed T-shirt of horses prancing in front of lightning, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, his hair done up in a tragically 1990s mullet, Hoffman’s overly confident jackass makes the mistake of taunting Phillip Baker Hall’s Sydney… Forget screen time or lead roles; in his youth, Hoffman didn’t even need for his characters to have names to make them memorable. 

Punk rock in its first form was obsessed with alienation and provocation, with separating true believers outfitted in the official punk uniform of safety pins, hair dye, jeans, and leather jackets from a world of buttoned-up squares who simply did not, and would never, understand what this thrilling new noise was all about. (Or that it was really about anything at all.) One of the pleasures and surprises of Allan Arkush’s joyous 1979 musical comedy Rock ’N’ Roll High School is how wonderfully inclusive it is. It does have its villains, authority figures who simply didn’t understand, most notably in the form of Principal Togar (Warhol scenester turned ubiquitous character actor Mary Woronov) and her sniveling, body-search-loving hall-monitor henchmen. But they are far outnumbered by kids, mice, and even adults who set aside their differences to celebrate the music of the Ramones…

“Even when the system works, I hate it. I choose my seats based where I’m most likely to be able to watch a movie without distractions. There’s strategy to this: The over-70 patrons at a matinee almost invariably chat away during a movie. They’re to be avoided. Anyone talking on the phone before a movie begins will likely keep talking on it once the movie starts: Also to be avoided. Does this person look likely to text during the movie? I want them out of my sight lines. I make dozens of little calculations before I sit down and they don’t stop once I’ve chosen a seat. I don’t mind other patrons talking during the trailers, but if they’re talking too much it tells me they’ll probably keep talking during the movie. If so, time to move. And if they’re talking during the movie, I need to move elsewhere. Reserved seating makes it impossible to choose a seat based on what I see in the theater and then locks me in, unable to move if where I’ve chosen plants me in the middle of a bunch of distractions.”

“[Cary] Grant was among the most ironic of the great actors of Golden Age Hollywood. There was almost invariably a wink and a sly nod in his signature performances that let audiences know that he was in on the joke, that no matter what was happening to him onscreen, he never took it too seriously. So even though Grant’s advertising agent Roger Thornhill spends North By Northwest literally running for his life across a series of picturesque tableaus, most notably Mount Rushmore, he never really seems to be in much danger. He’s never so terrified that he can’t drop the perfect bon mot or flirt outrageously with Eva Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall. The whole ‘running for your life’ thing even seems to strike him as a bit of a laugh, a way to liven up an otherwise dull stretch of living.”