Bird Watching
Bird Watching – Bridesmaids: The Morning After
You would think I had produced the film, with how desperately I wanted Bridesmaids to make a ton of money this past weekend. I’m not a person who makes a point to read box office predictions, and in this case I actively avoided it—any prediction,…
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Bird Watching – Lone Scherfig’s “Italian for Beginners”
I had never known anything about the film Italian for Beginners, except that I remember seeing it in the video store back in the Blockbuster days and immediately dismissing it as a rental possibility based on the hideous box art alone. This is shallow of…
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Bird Watching – Claire Denis’s “White Material”
Here is what I did immediately upon finishing the film White Material (2009), from French director Claire Denis: I started it over. This was a film that was at once so absorbing and so disorienting that I had to go through it again to feel…
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Bird Watching – In Defense of “Marie Antoinette”
It saddens me that the prevalent thought is that Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) was a disappointing follow-up to her career-making Lost in Translation (2003). In box office terms, yes, it very much underperformed. And it didn’t storm the awards season as Translation did. But…
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Bird Watching – Cheryl Hines’s “Serious Moonlight”
One might, in general, think that a bad way to get someone to love you is to throw a flower pot at their head, knocking them unconscious, then duct tape them to a chair so they wake up unable to move. Louise, played by Meg…
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Bird Watching – Adrienne Shelly’s “Sudden Manhattan”
What an oddly sad experience, watching the quirky little film Sudden Manhattan (1996), from the late actress, writer, and director Adrienne Shelly. In her film, Shelly stars as an aimless 30-year-old woman named Donna, living in Manhattan, who has just lost her job, and thinks…
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Bird Watching – Amy Heckerling’s “Clueless”
In last week’s Top 5, Ben and John discussed their favorite teen comedies, which served as the inspiration for the film I want to discuss this week: the brilliant and hilarious Clueless, from writer/director Amy Heckerling. An earlier film directed by Heckerling, the Cameron Crowe-written…
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Bird Watching – Meghan Eckman’s “The Parking Lot Movie”
I am the sort of person who will glance over at drivers in other cars, or catch a glimpse in a living room window while walking down the street, and be momentarily overcome with the desire to know that person’s story. That kind of impulse…
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