To see and experience and be reduced to weeping while watching Model Shop — and not just to log it on this site, not just to say "I have seen a Demy film" — is to talk about cars. That goes for the rest of the films Demy made in the 1960s. It's not enough to have your mind evoke the pastel costumes, the musical numbers, the tone of daft fantasia: to have a position risks detouring us down the…
Vale, M. Lynch. The summer of 2017 was filled with bewitching, wondrous energy. And many summers to come.
Here's all the pieces that I wrote that summer, when I used to work at the San Francisco Chronicle, on Twin Peaks: The Return:
PART 8
David Lynch’s revival of the ’90s cult show “Twin Peaks” is the most daring hour of TV in a long time. In particular, “Part 8,” which aired on June 25, sent viewers into a tailspin (for…
Wang goes Welles — really, Stanley Cortez, who had the experimental range to lens both Magnificent Ambersons and Shock Corridor ... and this careening, cumulatively engaging 3-hour study of the poet Rimbaud suggests a productive meeting point of both. More to the point, Wang's approach inspires the attentive viewer to find different ways to tell the history of a people, of a movement, of the intersection of colonialism and the emergence of the individual, of a strain of poetry, and…
The grey-bearded cinephile gent next to me whispered, over the end credits, that the work was "stranglingly sad." That's it! We both barely had words. We had been suffocated. We needed air from the sadness, presented as facts as material as a yellow shoe's ribbon fated to possess a double life. This is a film which, in a sing-song manner that will go down best and smoothly for an impressionable 8th-grade class of musician tweens just starting to learn their…
Nope. This ain’t it, chief. My estimation of Baker’s cinema has lessened with each new film since the galvanizing call of Tangerine, and now with this, his biggest Hollywood cash-cow, Baker reaches a kind of defeatist and profoundly depressing nadir that left me disappointed, baffled, bored. THAT’s what you have to say about this baddie? That’s it? That’s the best you can come up with? Who is this devastation for? Is it for Cannes approval? Baker in Hollywood continues his leering…
So, to recap: INTERSTELLAR, Love conquers all 🥰; DUNKIRK, Home is where the heart is 🏡 ; OPPENHEIMER, it’s complicated 🤷🏻
OR
If I wanted the Wikipedia article, I would just read it.
OR
Needs more Albert Einstein randomly barging in Kramer-style.
Two hours spent obscenely building up suspense of a vile image: the explosion of the A-bomb? two minutes of a tossed-away announcement that the bomb was dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? dumb corny Marvel-y zingers?…
