Continuing the airing of my 3d-istaste (you see what I just did there?), I thought I’d pass along this post about the general laziness of 3d. This, more than anything else, might be the thing that renders 3d virtually obsolete before it really gets off the ground this time. While even poorly done sound (and [...]

In Anthony Lane’s article in The New Yorker this week (last week? I’m never really sure how magazine publication dates work), he repeats the growing party line that 3d is the undeniable future of movies. Now, I haven’t seen Avatar, or honestly, any of the other 3d movies in the last couple years that are [...]

I’m not actually sure what this study really proves. Essentially, they claim that recent blockbusters are better at mimicking the ebb and flow of attention spans, but as Professor Blough always said, “Correlation does not mean causation.” It could be that the editing in recent blockbusters is better at tapping in to some sort of [...]

I just watched: Die Hard, Love Actually & Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
So, I think we can all agree that the best Christmas movie of all time is Die Hard, right? Good.
Here’s the thing, though: I can’t think of Alan Rickman as anything but Hans Gruber. Can you? Can his mom? This works to [...]

When I was younger, there was literally nothing I thought was cooler that the idea that you could watch any movie you wanted without having to go to a video store, hoping it was in stock. Probably because of that, I mentally marked that technology (and this commercial) as how I would know that we [...]

David Bordwell is a consistently good read (even when he’s getting a little too into the finer points of silent Danish cinema from the 1910s for my tastes), and his latest “How I spent my summer” post is especially good.
I think he gives Tarantino a bit too much credit for the “innovative structure.” I mean, [...]

This article is probably the most insightful appreciation of John Woo’s appeal that I’ve ever read, and to a certain extent, it might even serve as a blanket explanation for the appeal of all action films (if not all of cinema).
I had never really considered Woo’s work to be so intimately bound up with the [...]

This article on sports greats seems applicable to yesterday’s post about genius in the arts and brings us back again to Rosenbaum’s insistence that genius is based, at least partly, on limitless self-confidence. That still seems wrong to me, but it’s certainly harder to dispute in the case of athletes.

Ron Rosenbaum has an article today in which he discusses just what exactly “genius” means. I have trouble agreeing too much with his suggestion that genius requires an unshakable confidence — after all, there are probably untold numbers other high school rivals who talked about which of them would win the Nobel prize but whose [...]

I just watched: The Wrestler.
Darren Aronofsky makes amazing movies. That is not to say he necessarily makes great movies. The Fountain is perhaps the stand-out example here; watching it, I kept thinking, “Wow, what a colossal failure.” It might, my internal monologue conceded, have been a noble failure, but it was definitely just a big [...]