When you think of a perfect film what comes to mind?
Citizen Kane, perhaps? Hitchcock’s Vertigo? The Godfather? The Rules of the Game? Chinatown? Some other auteur-helmed flick listed in Sight & Sound magazine’s once-a-decade “Greatest Films of All Time” list?
Revisiting this virtuosic scene recently, it occurred to me that someone working for the American Council of the Blind (ACB) had to describe the action, presumably with a straight face, for its Audio Description Project, which, as I’m sure you know, provides the visually impaired with “high-quality audio description in television, movies, performing arts…and other venues where the presentation of visual media is critical to the understanding and appreciation of the content.”
Happy 2021. Sorry for the lack on content; I’ve been busy attempting to be the best version of me, for me, in what promises to be an exciting new year of quarantining.
A bit of exciting news to report to those who have nothing else going on in their lives: currently working on a long-form post tackling a very important subject. Stay tuned!
No, this post isn’t about weed. Or that Claire Denis sci-fi film starring Cedric Diggory. Rather, it’s about beer commercials. Which, edited within an inch of their lives, full of overwrought reaction shots by actors of middling talent (or anthropomorphized animals) and, of course, heavy on the jiggle factor, generally suck. (Unless, of course, you fall into the male 12-34 years demo.)
I don’t know about you, but the byproducts of COVID-19 isolation—soul-crushing ennui, crippling depression, nightmares in which Mike Pence calls me “mother” before sneezing in my face—has made the thought of writing a movie blogpost about as appealing as a nasopharyngeal swab.
Wrapping up our series on biological disaster flicks, we officially plow into the side of a mountain with a movie so bad, it’s good.
Full disclosure: this film was “Made for TV” (ABC-TV as it happens). And while a certain demographic may shrug at the news (after all, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad were “Made for TV”!), those of us old enough to have survived
In 1944, in an attempt to bolster a British morale deflated by hardship both home and abroad, Sir Lawrence Olivier co-adapted, directed and starred in Shakespeare’s Henry V, a bit of altruism (narcissism?) that not only went over big with critics and the general public, but also garnered him a special Academy Award. Mission accomplished!
You ever found yourself surveying the accumulation of detritus that is your abode, thinking: Christ, what a shit-show? And pledging to yourself that, come the weekend, all that bric-a-brac, all those bits and bobs, all that knick-knackery, will be donated to the Salvation Army so…help…you…God!
There are precious few times that one enters the darkness of a cinema only to emerge a few hours later transformed into a better human, one who has glimpsed the human condition as never before and, as such, achieved a certain enlightenment or—dare I say?—grace.
45th President of the United States of America, Mr. Donald J. Trump Continue reading