“I could love you if you’d let me.” So sings Don Baker, one of the protagonists of 1972’s Butterflies are Free. Despite flying mostly under the radar, the film has a lot going for it. Like a lot of films adapted from stage plays, the narrative is very dialogue driven, which makes for a lot of really sharp, entertaining banter. There are maybe three locations and four or five speaking roles, with a healthy majority of the dialogue seated between... Read more
There was something like a sixteen-year gap between when I was first traumatized by Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds as a kid and when I finally revisited it within the last year or so. And what stood out to me most with this recent revival is the way that the film never really left me. There was very little to “rediscover,” as it were, because I found that I remembered almost all of the film down... Read more
If there is any part of the human condition more constant than the search for happiness, it is the fear that one will never find it. This is the hanging question for the titular character in Federico Fellini’s 1957 masterwork, Nights of Cabiria. For reference, the movie begins with Cabiria’s lover pushing her into a river and taking her purse while leaving her to drown. This is a window into the life of our protagonist, the spunky yet tender-hearted Cabiria,... Read more
Today we’re going to do something a little different and venture more into something a little more avant-garde than the films we usually talk about. Don’t get scared. This is actually where most of the really fun film discussion is. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life invites the viewer to explore the boundary between reality and human perception. The film follows an unnamed protagonist as he wanders through various dreamlike scenes in search of truth. The entire film is rendered through animation,... Read more
A year or two back, a film review channel I follow made a point in one of their videos that the romantic break-up is a mainstay of pop culture (Rachel and Ross can break up or just evade reconciliation a good six or seven times over the run of FRIENDS) while there isn’t really a cultural touchstone for processing the dissolution of a friendship. And now I wonder if Martin McDonagh also follows this channel because his recent film (and... Read more
A couple weeks back we discussed From Here to Eternity and doing the right thing even under pressure, and I’d like to use this space here to follow up on some of those same discussions. For this installment, we turn our attention to Cameron Crowe’s 1996 film, Jerry Maguire. Our titular sports agent begins the film with a one-track mind that values visible signifiers of success at all costs. This makes him both a servant of a cynical system that... Read more
Lately I’ve been very invested in the works of director Jon M. Chu. He was the man behind the camera for In the Heights, my favorite movie of 2021, and he’s also helming the upcoming Wicked movies for Universal. While I know Crazy Rich Asians wasn’t his first film (or even his first Hollywood film), it was the movie that brought him to my attention as a filmmaker. This romantic-comedy follows Rachel Chu, a Chinse-American professor dating the dashing and... Read more
And now we turn our attention to that most enticing and elusive of experiences in these modern days: peace. Moreover, I’d like to do so through the lens of one of one of my favorite films. John Ford’s 1952 film, The Quiet Man, is a special sort of film that extracts a lot of drama from a fairly intimate, self-contained story, and all without coming off as melodramatic or self-indulgent. This is also one of the most visually beautiful films... Read more
Telling a story through any medium is an innately personal endeavor, but the process can still be especially vulnerable for specific stories. Alfonso Cuaron, for example, has shared that about 90 percent of the scenes in his 2018 film, Roma, came straight from his own memory. The film follows the lives of an upper-middle class family living in Mexico in the 1970s. The story is seen primarily through the eyes of one of the family’s live-in maids, Cleo, as she is... Read more
The appeal of Michel Gondry’s 2004 romance, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, rests on a simple premise: what if you could erase from your mind all the memories of someone who brought you pain? This is a possibility posed to Joel Barrish and Clementine Kruczynski, who undergo such a procedure after a long romance and a brutal break-up. We experience this film primarily through the eyes of Joel, who wants the procedure done after finding that Clementine has already... Read more
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