Everything Everywhere All At Once is a flash bang of a film. One might even call it a big bang. You’re sitting in your dark, cool theater seat — the first you’ve taken since the pandemic — and Bang! The movie explodes in action and exposition, and doesn’t give a damn if you can keep up …
Dear Healthy People, My, how our knickers got into a twist after the Academy Awards Sunday, which may go down as the liveliest memorial service of the 21st Century. Funerals can get testy. But that’s not the takeaway from the slap-happy ceremony. This is: Enough with the bogus indignation over jokes about medical ailments. And …
The pandemic has become the Black Plague to film. But it sure does love good TV. Witness the latest television shows to dominate not only America’s nightly ratings, but its nightly chatter on social media (perhaps a more vital audience): Ted Lasso, Pam & Tommy and The Beatles: Get Back. They seem starkly unique in audience, tone and subject …
Paul Thomas Anderson is to the San Fernando Valley what Woody Allen is to Manhattan — without the creepiness. Sure, Quentin Tarantino grew up here. Chinatown is here. And Hollywood has one address. But Anderson represents the sprawling, tacky heart of the Valley. Half Stanley Kubrick, half strip shopping mall, Anderson is the avatar for …
Spoiler alerts have become to movies what the Surgeon General’s warning became to smoking: a perfunctory caution before ill-advised behavior. Remember plot twists in movies? The stunning revelations in films such as Psycho, The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense? Good times. And getting rarer. When was the last time you were surprised by a movie’s plot? Studios are trying to …
Damn Ken Burns. He ruins everything for me. First it was TV. His visual opuses — Hemingway, Vietnam, The Civil War — put other television shows to shame, including my favorites: Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, The Simpsons. NOW he’s ruined storytelling for me. His latest non-fiction tale, Ali, ranks among my favorites. I was already a sports nut, so there was no …
I’m sorry. I have to say something. I had a problem with Val, and I have a problem with Val, the Amazon film that’s dazzling critics and has set social media a’swoon. Complete with yearbook videos of Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon and others from the dimpled heyday of a Dirty Dancing generation, Val charts the Shakespearean fall of …
In one history of the movies, Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz might look like a footnote. The former playwright had a hand in many famous pictures, including The Wizard of Oz, but most went uncredited. He was the smartest guy in the room, a drunk and a gambler who was dead at 55. And his kid brother, …
There Will Be Blood is ostensibly about real-life California oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, and even includes the now-famous “I drink your milkshake!” quote, attributed to Doheny during Congressional investigations of the industry. But on Deja-View, it sure seems like Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson is actually paying homage to Stanley Kubrick, particularly 2001: A Space Odyssey. And if …
The Hollywood Bowles 