They pit the lifers against the new boys, the young against the old, the black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.
Where has Blue Collar been all my life?
Paul Schrader’s directorial debut is masterful in the sense that he crafts a biting, edgy, and clear-eyed critique of capitalism, union corruption, and inequality by packaging it within a tight, thrilling potboiler with well developed three-dimensional characters. Every single character detail and story beat…
Buster Keaton’s The General is named after its main character’s first love: his train. Likewise, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore is named after its main character’s first love: his school. Though both films have their main characters fall in love with a woman, their relationships with their respective inanimate objects are of significant value, if not more so.
Mind you, Max Fischer doesn’t love Rushmore Academy for the education. He gets terrible grades, but he’s creative and knows how to pull a…
My first from Jacques Tati.
Much like the films of Buster Keaton, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is built around not plot, but visual gags, one after another. While the film has sound, the dialogue is almost entirely irrelevant, requiring the viewer to focus solely on the physical movement of the film’s peculiarly charming lead (played by the director himself) and those around him as the titular character causes a stranger holiday than usual for everyone in the film’s seaside hotel.
Unlike…
Much like the classical compositions that Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár conducts, Todd Field’s latest film (and my first of his) is exquisitely crafted and succeeds in the strength of its nuances. Field uses ice-cold, widescreen cinematography and carefully-crafted sound design to probe a rich, complicated character and explore themes that are of the utmost relevance to today’s society. The cinematic counterpart that most came to mind was Martin Scorsese’s boxing masterpiece, Raging Bull, and not just because both films are…
