Celebrating Community
What compels a master of his craft — at the height of his powers — to walk away, to say “finito”? That question haunts Bruce Weber’s documentary The Treasure of His Youth: The Photographs of Paolo Di Paolo, and it’s one the filmmaker spends 105 minutes not answering. It’s easy to be taken in by the film because it’s […]
Dan Perri isn’t a name you see, as they say, above a movie’s title. That’s because he designed the title. In a monumental five-decade career that began with The Exorcist, Perri created more than 200 titles for some of the biggest, most important movies ever made: A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Warriors, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Bull […]
Let’s talk about some recent movies! I’ll start: Confess, Fletch. It’s pretty fun, a decades-in-the-making reboot of Chevy Chase’s 1980s comedy-mystery franchise based on Gregory McDonald’s series of novels, with Jon Hamm in the role as investigative reporter-turned-amateur-gumshoe I.M. Fletcher. It’s a solid effort from director and co-writer Greg Mottola, albeit a bit too shaggy and padded out to meet […]
When was the last time you thought about Elvis Presley? When did you last think about breathing? Elvis is everywhere and nowhere — in music and marriage, camp and cliché, a singular entity who inspired countless imitators and reshaped nearly every facet of American life. Forty-five years after his death, his endurance is something of a paradox — more complicated […]
John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which turned 60 this year, is undeniably a classic. Pairing John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart for the first time, it’s the Western that introduced Duke’s “Pilgrim” into the Hollywood firmament and gave the world the irresistible line, spoken by a newspaper editor, “When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.” And, […]
The opening credit sequence is now a kind of lost cinematic art. But there was a time when this overture, designed to ease viewers into a film’s world and tone, was ubiquitous. And even then, the first minutes of Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success pulsed with a rare energy and artistry. An overhead shot of Times Square […]
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one with the fewest Spider-Men, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” in 1915 as a reflection on self-determination, or maybe a goof on his walking buddy. But, c’mon, he’s clearly got the multiverse on his mind. Two roads, two choices, two […]
Is it too early to say there won’t be a 2022 Major League Baseball season? Because it sure feels like there won’t be one. If the current lockout, which has already claimed some of Spring Training, begins eating regular season games, which seems likely, who knows where things end — or how the shrinking fan base will react. But maybe […]
A strange Vice headline recently crossed my feeds: “Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China.” Thanks to Tencent Video, Fight Club, director David Fincher’s searing adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, finally made it to China! Only took 22 years. Thing is, it also came with a new finale. If it’s been a while, a quick refresher: […]
In spring 1999, the world stared down a new century. It prepped for a Y2K computer meltdown, grappled with millennial paranoia, witnessed widening class and wealth gaps, and wrestled with culture rapidly moving online. Into this din came the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, its sexy leather-clad cyberpunk heroes kung-fu fighting and bullet dodging the Men in Black avatars of an evil […]