Much more over with the good folks at Variety, including the pretty funny Kevin Hart comedy About Last Night, the not particularly good but whatever horror film Haunt with Jacki Weaver in a small role, the deplorably stupid Down and Dangerous, and the deplorably moralistic and simply pointless Lucky Bastard. These kind of reviews are fun to write!
Over at To Be (Cont'd), the March discussion is between Abbey Bender and myself on the idea of timeless films, dated-ness, and the historical spectator. I wrote the fist post here. It also has gotten some great response over at The Dissolve through Noel Murray's excellent "Feedback" column.
Over at The Film Stage, I tried to find the Soderbergh side to his not-so recognizably Soderbergh film King of the Hill, which is now out on Criterion Blu (and has his 1995 feature The Underneath as a bonus feature).
Over at In Review Online, I dug further into Vulgar Auteurism with Paul WS Anderson's Pompeii, a pointedly disappointing work from the man. Never go without Milla again, good sir.
If you haven't heard Kent Jones on The Cinephiliacs, then something is very wrong with you.
On Letterboxd, by auteur:
George Cukor: The Philadelphia Story, A Woman's Face, Born Yesterday, The Marrying Kind, and A Star is Born.
Delmer Daves: The Hanging Tree
Johnnie To: Sparrow and Running on Karma
Hong Sang-Soo: Oki's Movie and The Day He Arrives
Teinosuke Kinugasa: Crossroads and A Page of Madness
Edgar Ulmer: The Light Ahead, Murder is My Beat, and Beyond the Time Barrier.
Silent Stuff: Chaplin's The Kid and DeMille's The Cheat
I promise to get better at updating this quicker so anyone who wants to know what I'm doing will not be confused. So here we go.
I am now writing for Variety. Yes, *that* Variety. I am honored to join a team that includes Scott Foundas, Peter Debruge, and Justin Chang leading the charge, among many others. I'll have a few reviews in the month of February, but for now my first piece is on Freezer, a not so good movie about Dylan McDermott trapped in a freezer. Gotta start somewhere.
Were you looking for my Top 10 films of 2013? I talked about my choices with Keith Uhlich on The Cinephiliacs, which you can listen to both Part 1 and Part 2. My choices also come in a list-handy form on Letterboxd.
Thief came out on Blu-Ray via The Cirterion Collection, so I wrote about how Thief is still pretty awesome over at The Film Stage. I also edited this fantastic conversation on the film between Jordan Cronk and Nick Usen at To Be Cont'd.
Jean-Claude Van Damme re-teamed with Peter Hyams for Enemies Closer. Could have been better, but not the worst way to spend January at the movies. I reviewed over at In Review Online.
On The Cinephiliacs: Noah Isenberg, the author of the recent biography on Edgar Ulmer, and former Film Society of Lincoln Center slash New York Film Festival programmer Richard Pena. Both are excellent listens.
On Letterboxd...The Wolf of Wall Street, Dangerous Game, Chaplin's A Day's Pleasure, Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, Howard Hawks's Red Line 7000 and The Big Sky, Cukor's The Women, Wellman's Lady of Burlesque, The Freshman starring Harold Lloyd, The Color Wheel, Shanghai Express, Hong Sang-Soo's In Another Country, Arthur Penn's The Chase, The Typhoon with Sessue Hayakawa, Aldrich's Emperor of the North, and Minnelli's Gigi.
I finished my graduate degree. More TK on what follows.
