Author Archive
Film Review – Roman J. Israel, Esq.
Sometimes the most frustrating experience with a movie can be the clear signs of missed potential and dropped expectations. There’s usually a moment with an experience like that where one can see the point where the decisions that were made turn against the potential. In…
READ MORE
Film Review – Justice League
With all its spectacle and bluster, Justice League opens on a low-quality shot designed like it’s coming from someone’s phone. Encompassing the shot is Superman (Henry Cavill), before his death in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a boy asks him what his favorite thing…
READ MORE
Film Review – Wonderstruck
A large part of our development as humans is having a sense of belonging. Where one fits inside a family, at school, at work, with friends and in the pantheon of the world at large, is part of the identification of one’s self. Belonging though,…
READ MORE
Film Review – The Florida Project
The folly of youth is both a license for freedom and a litany of restrictions. Boundaries are pushed to learn where they exist. In effect, the experiential learning of one’s place in the world. Youth, in all its precariousness, is probably as reflexive as we…
READ MORE
Film Review – The Snowman
In the town of Oslo, Norway a serial killer hunts women and leaves behind a snowman as a calling card. Alcoholic detective Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender) takes up the investigation to find the killer. In some regards that sounds like a solid setup to a…
READ MORE
Film Review – Blade Runner 2049
An eye opens and a world is reflected. A wide landscape filled with white towers, surrounded by an expanse of agriculture. From its opening frames, Blade Runner 2049 is making statements that it is both beholden to its predecessor and going to be something of…
READ MORE
An Appreciation – Blade Runner
An Introduction to Dreaming About Sheep I was 11 years old when I saw a trailer for Blade Runner. Sitting in the living of our family home, watching something on the now defunct Seattle TV station, KSTW channel 11, when the trailer came on during…
READ MORE
Film Review – Endless Poetry
Late in the film, nearing the climax of its final act, the character Alejandro Jodorowsky (Adan Jodorowsky) tells his family of artist friends that he is moving from their home of Chile to Paris, France where he will “save surrealism.” The proclamation, prophetic and self-referential,…
READ MORE