The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
The Place Beyond the Pines begins with a long tracking shot, and the shot acts as a summary of everything that’s good about the movie: its confidence, its ambition, and its meager but distinct accomplishments.
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Look, we’re going to have to make a decision about Quentin Tarantino.
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To be accepted, to be relevant, he would need to become someone else. He would spend the next half-century creating that person and then, at age 60, decide that it was time to reveal his true self, in Father Goose.
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In Anderson’s hands, we are always on a journey into the troubled minds and hearts of men at war with themselves; to the intersection of primitive impulses and intellectual aspiration; and, never more than in The Master, through hubris, half-blind seeking, and love that destroys itself.
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Marlon Brando was the greatest film actor of the 20th century, and a failure.
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There are two ways of looking at Drive, the recent Ryan Gosling noir. You can consider what happens on the screen—the plot, dialogue, and action, or you can consider what doesn’t happen—the many silences, distances, empty spaces, questions left unanswered, and motives left unclear.
Terrence Malick gets points for sincerity. In fact, he gets all the points for sincerity, every single one of them.
If the only thing you’ve seen of the new Robert De Niro/Edward Norton film, Stone, is the trailer, you may feel that your membership in the Robert De Niro Disappointment Club has been justified yet again.
I hate Roger Ebert. This may not be the most tactful time to say so, what with his genuinely brave fight against cancer, his inspiring display of spirit and endurance, and the endless adulation all this has encouraged in the press
I should say at the outset that while Bullet Park is a good book, and in my opinion a great book, it is not a sound book.
Cheever is rightly (though myopically) criticized for never having really solved the novel, and most of the five he wrote, including both Bullet Park and even the one generally considered his best, Falconer, show his struggle plainly: He was a peerless short story writer, and when he takes on the novel it’s a bit like a baseball player who never really learned how to swing a golf club.
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How much bad Hollywood filmmaking can one man take in a day? With my wife and kids out of town for a week, I decided to find out.
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Here’s a little news worth sharing: Christopher Nolan does not shit solid gold. Like most people, he shits shit. Inception, for example.
Let me explain:
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Something horrible is coming to 17 Cherry Tree Lane.
If the sight of a 10-year-old girl acrobatically and graphically hacking up a roomful of muscle-bound drug dealers makes you squirm, then Kick-Ass is not your kind of film. Also, we probably can’t be friends.
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Egoyan skillfully balances a rote exercise in marital discord with a less-rote exercise in narrative suspense; but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the former exists only to distract from the shortcomings of the latter.
When Scorsese makes a new film, the question is less whether it’s good than whether the decision to make it in the first place was good.
What is it with the Coen brothers, technical masters who tend to use their skills for no meaningful purpose?
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It’s funny, the word choice in the title of Jennifer’s Body, the gory horror-comedy from, improbably enough, the writer and producers of Juno, 2007’s teen pregnancy comedy.
It must take guts to embark upon a film like 9, Shane Acker’s dark and thrilling feature-length version of his 2005 short film of the same name. Thick with paranoid dread and post-Apocalyptic atmosphere, 9 is a film with so many obvious antecedents
Sizing up history is a tricky business: You can generally recognize that something is significant long before you can really say why or how. So it is with the Internet and its many pioneers. So it is with Josh Harris.
I remember being pretty casual