By Rick, on January 8th, 2008 |
Mike Nichols isn’t a particularly flashy director. He’s not a flash-in-the-pan, or a lightening rod like P.T. Anderson or Eli Roth, argued about and fought over with great bloggish ferocity. He’s simply a veteran director with over forty years in the business. He first burst onto the stage when he won the [...]
By Rick, on January 3rd, 2008 |
Unlike a real critic, I don’t have to go to movies I don’t think I’m going to like. I don’t have an editor assigning me films to review, nor do I feel the need to see everything, so I can warn the public–the members of which don’t listen to critics anyway–not to waste its [...]
By Rick, on January 2nd, 2008 |
Movie City News is keeping track of the year-end goings on; they’ve got a Big-Ass Chart (don’t blame me, that’s what they call it) with upwards of 175 critics’ top-ten lists tabulated. By their reckoning, the film with the most cred on critic’s year-end lists is No Country for Old Men, by a long [...]
By Rick, on December 30th, 2007 |
John Sayles’ Honeydripper opened in New York and Los Angeles to mixed reviews. Stephen Holden of the New York Times found Sayles’ myth- and archetype-making machinery falling flat:
“‘Honeydripper’ is agreeable, well-intentioned and very, very slow. Sadly, it illustrates the difference between an archetype and a stereotype. When the first falls flat, it turns into [...]
By Rick, on December 27th, 2007 |
Did you know there was a National Film Registry? I didn’t, until I read about here it at GreenCine. Seems that under the provisions of the National Film Preservation Act of 1992,
“each year the Librarian of Congress, with advice from the National Film Preservation Board, names 25 films to [...]
By Rick, on December 25th, 2007 |
As a prologue to her year-end top-ten list, Manohla Dargis of the New York Times writes
“THE whole point of a Top 10 list, a friend recently scolded me, is to number them. (I was declining to do so.) My friend was wrong, but only because Top 10 lists are artificial exercises, assertions of critical ego, [...]