BY JAMES M. DAVIS “Enhanced Individuals,” we hear in a newscast at the beginning of Captain America: Civil War, need to be brought into check. At first glance this phrase does what is intended, it deprives superheroes of being both “super” and “heroes.” This is a world where masked super-people have (accidentally) killed innocent people in operations unapproved by any governmental body. Through this phrase we are brought into a world where the Avengers are being asked to sign an accord with the UN which would essentially turn them into a peacekeeping force at the beck and call of […]
CINEMA: Being Hal Ashby
LOOKIN’ TO GET OUT (1982, directed by Hal Ashby, 120 minutes U.S.) SECOND HAND HEART (aka THE HAMSTER OF LOVE) (1981, directed by Hal Ashby, 102 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s popular tome about American film in the 1970s, Hal Ashby is held up as the quintessential director of his era. Ashby specialized in humanistic tales of outcasts looking for love and struggling to find their place in the world and the seven films he made between 1970 and 1979 make for an unusually rich and diverse body of work, […]
CINEMA: Being Miles Davis
NEW YORKER: Davis’s life, in his own telling, is a trouble-filled adventure, in which racism and drugs, hedonism and violence, artistic vision and brute desire are intertwined. The hardest thing for an artistic biography to accomplish is to associate the art with the life without reducing the pure artistic drive to psychological and sociological determinism. Even though “Miles Ahead” fails in this regard, I have sympathy for Cheadle’s odd uses of some of Davis’s greatest music. For instance, Davis’s violent fight with Taylor is depicted as occurring while the other four members of Davis’s superb “second quintet” are rehearsing […]
CINEMA: I’ll Just Leave This Here
Anybody who’s never seen Convoy is unwittingly living a life of diminished expectations. Anybody’s who’s seen it knows what diminished expectations feels like. It’s kind of a lose-lose where everybody wins!
CINEMA: Biff! Bang! Pow!
VULTURE: It’s a shame that ‘Batman v Superman’ is also a storytelling disgrace. It has maybe six opening scenes and jumps so incessantly from subplot to subplot that a script doctor would diagnose a peculiarly modern infection: “disjunctivitis.” Said infection is the upshot of a sort of gene-splicing. For a studio to move beyond the “franchise” and “tentpole” stages to the vastly lucrative “universe,” a comic-book movie must at every turn gesture towards sequels and spinoffs, teasing out loose ends, cultivating irresolution. The movie wanders into so many irrelevant byways that it comes to seem abstract. There’s enough going on to […]
CINEMA: The Mass Hallucination of Kenn Kweder
Adventures of a Secret Kidd: The Mass Hallucination of Kenn Kweder: TEASER from john hutelmyer on Vimeo. ADVENTURES OF A SECRET KIDD: THE MASS HALLUCINATION OF KENN KWEDER SCREENS @ INTERNATIONAL HOUSE @ 7 PM TONIGHT
CINEMA: A Knight In The Ruts
KNIGHT OF CUPS (2016, directed by Terrence Malick, 118 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It took a lot of mental thrashing to come to this conclusion but weeks after screening Terrence Malick’s latest magnum opus Knight of Cups, I feel comfortable saying that it is a major Terrence Malick film. What else is there to compare it to? Who else in Hollywood can drum up such a plush budget and major box-office stars to make a plotless, nearly dialogue-free rumination on the big meanings of life? And who else could make it something you’d want to watch? […]
CINEMA: Black Is the Color Of My True Love’s Hair
EW: Nina, the long-awaited and quite controversial Nina Simone biopic starring Zoe Saldana, is finally becoming a reality: On Tuesday, EW revealed the film’s poster and release date, and today, audiences get their first look at Nina’s trailer. The film follows Simone through her legendary career as an American vocalist, particularly her years living in isolation in France after finding it difficult to balance her singing career with her political activism. In France, she meets the man who will become her assistant-turned-manager, Clifton Henderson (Selma’s David Oyelowo). Nina is directed by first-timer Cynthia Mort. Controversy has plagued the film for years: Back in 2010, Mary J. Blige was […]
Q&A: Jacob Bond, Star Of #boyband Mockumentary
BY CHARLIE TAYLOR boyband is a hilarious new mockumentary web series that, as the title suggests, lampoons the boy band phenomenon. In a verite style reminiscent of The Office or This Is Spinal Tap, boyband gives the viewer a behind the scenes glimpse of the making of a pre-fab pop stars, as five wouldbe teen idols are fed into the machinery of the pop industrial complex and emerge as the hapless competition of the likes of One Direction — or, as the show’s tagline puts it, “five doofuses make the transition from garage band to boy band.” Hilarity ensues. […]
CINEMA: Shagadelic, Baby!
THE TOUCHABLES (1968, directed by Robert Freeman, 89 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC As part of The Philadelphia Art Museum’s “Pop Goes the Museum” exhibition The Secret Cinema will be presenting a rare screening of Robert Freeman’s 1968 Pop-tastic film, The Touchables in 16mm. Set in and around “Swingin’ London” The Touchables was dismissed by Renata Adler at the New York Times as “a sort of fidgety mod pornography, ” perhaps understandable in its time. Yet to modern eyes the film looks like a 60s fetishist’s catalog of groovy fashions, beautiful people, and Playboy Magazine-derived titillation, off-set […]
CRITICAL CONDITION: An In-Depth Q&A With New York Times Senior Film Critic A.O. Scott
Artwork via collageOrama BY JONATHAN VALANIA A.O. “Tony” Scott has been the New York Times resident film critic for going on 16 years. He has a razor-sharp intellect, unimpeachable taste, the chops to formulate persuasive, deep-end-of-the-pool aesthetic arguments and advance them in elegant and indelible prose — no matter what Samuel L. Jackson says. His new book, Better Living Through Criticism, mounts a robust defense of the necessity of professional arbiters in the age of Yelp and Metacritic. In advance of his reading/signing at the Free Library tonight, we got Mr. Scott on the horn in Seattle during a rare […]
CINEMA: Fight The Power!
Just as it was shocking that it took till 2014 to get a major fictionalized film of Martin Luther King Jr. it is surprisingly that the explosive story of The Black Panther Party would not have a major documentary until now. Stanley Nelson Jr.’s documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution assembles all the important people and footage to tell this story of a revolution’s rise and its government-engineered fall with power and insight. It may have arrived late but in light of the Black Lives Matter movement the film has appeared right on time. — DAN BUSKIRK
CINEMA: American Unexceptionalism
WHERE TO INVADE NEXT (2015, directed by Michael Moore, 119 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Screened for critics back in December, Michael Moore’s latest documentary Who To Invade Next, has dramatically changed context in recent weeks. In December, Moore’s first film in six years seemed like another potent film essay critical of American politics. Today, the film plays like an impassioned plea for the Presidential candidate who has made the issues discussed within a centerpiece of his campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Despite the title, the film’s subject is not our military policy, it is is our […]