For months I’ve been thinking about sequels and second chances, about Paul Newman but also, increasingly, Tom Cruise.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid frustrates me like family.
We meet Newman's character at a disadvantage in The Sting, but because this is Paul Newman, and we know Paul Newman, it’s more than evident that The Paul Newman Show is about to begin.
I am thinking of films as haunted houses. I am thinking of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.
Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise is decadence splashed on celluloid, a celebration of the shine of glam rock, and a preemptive funeral for the scene officiated by the dark underside of the business.
Peyton Reed's Down With Love cleverly uses exaggeration, artifice, and opulence to rocket it past pastiche and into a new space where it utilizes the genre’s shenanigans in order to comment on the genre itself.
The original Matrix takes a question—What comes to mind when you think of opulence?—and revises it into a statement: Opulence is what comes to mind when you think.
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is a a true musical, with brass-cracking orchestration; colors so anodyne they whisper, so blaring they shout; voices that soar and temporize and stay. Within seconds, it necessitates its own existence.
The illusions of The French Dispatch are wondrous and sweet, and possibly vanishing. This singular setting and this singular filmmaker bolster one another, though, an inevitable convergence of two finely cultivated worlds—the outsider dream of France, and the extended universe of Wes Anderson.
Don’t Look Now is a story about vision. The things we see, the things we don’t, the things we see without using our eyes.
On the unbearable, beautiful messiness of a single line from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
On a plot level, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is about Indy saving his father. But on an emotional level, it is about Indy learning how to love his father, to accept his father’s guidance, and to discover how much his father already loves him.
