There’s a scene about two-thirds into David Fincher’s Zodiac in which David Toschi, the San Francisco homicide detective played by Mark Ruffalo, walks out of a screening of Dirty Harry in disgust, bemoaning the fact that he hasn’t solved the Zodiac case and “they’re already making movies about it.” (A colleague even jokes that “Harry […]
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Richard Linklater’s latest movie Everybody Wants Some!! follows the lives of college baseball players over a weekend in 1980, as they attempt to define themselves en route to adulthood. In one pivotal scene, Jake, a freshman pitcher, talks about his college admission essay, which compares baseball to Sisyphus from Greek mythology. What follows is that […]
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20th Century Fox’s Logan hits theaters this week, and while it’s by all accounts a fantastic film the aspect of it I’m most interested in right this second is its entry onto the list of movies named after one of their characters. There are tens of thousands of titles that feature a character’s name — […]
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George Santayana isn’t a household name, but something he said is one of the best-known quotations in human history: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As a bit of a history buff, I’m a big fan of that quote, and I think it is, for the most part, very true. If […]
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Memoirs of an Invisible Man sounds like a lazy joke in a comedy about 1985 Hollywood. A nameless executive is airing his daily grievances to an even more nameless assistant. Remind me to get John Carpenter and Chevy Chase on the phone about that invisible man picture — if the effects guys can’t make Chevy’s […]
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There is a certain movie formula where an ordinary man must do something illegal and dangerous (usually to save a loved one), but the task goes awry and he spends the next 24 hours running from bad guys (usually drug traffickers), becoming increasingly battered from all the auto wrecks and leaps from rooftops before finally […]
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A movie about an African-American boyfriend visiting his white girlfriend’s family home sounds like a hackneyed drama about race relations in America. But Get Out is no Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? The movie twists the cliched setup into a sharp horror-comedy … that is also an allegory about race relations in America. You know […]
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My fellow Americans, here we are at the dawn of a new day. A great, shining day of promise and change. Here we are, and here I am, Travis Bickle, your President. That’s a sentence I never expected to write, and one you probably never dreamed you would read. But it’s true all the same. […]
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The success of M. Night Shyamalan’s mind-bending thriller Split has inspired the director to announce plans to make a sequel to Unbreakable — a film that, until last week, I’d spent more than 16 years avoiding. Why avoid Unbreakable? To properly contextualize, let’s go back to Thanksgiving 2000, when Shyamalan, off the critical and commercial […]
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Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea and Damian Chazelle’s La La Land, two Oscar contenders with more differences than similarities, use music in contrasting yet complementary ways. La La Land is a love letter to both the bygone era of movie musicals (shot in Cinemascope, for all you West Side Story fans) and that supposedly […]
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Gore Verbinski has directed three Pirates of the Caribbean movies and The Lone Ranger, plus The Ring, Rango, and Mousehunt, as well as under-seen gems The Mexican and The Weather Man. With such a varied resume that includes remakes and adaptations, it’s hard to pin down Verbinski’s own aesthetics. What is HE interested in? I’ve always […]
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There are certain movies that filled my teen years. Some of these, like Sixteen Candles and The Lost Boys, are staples that have been passed on to the next generation. But one seems forever stuck between “forgotten” and “cult classic.” Every two years or so, someone will bring it up and a bunch of people […]
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