Reaction Shots

Walking out of Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t! , co-written with his wife and editor Tricia Cooke, I felt like some of the earlier viewers of The Big Lebowski who just didn’t get it. The big difference here is that I LOVED The Big Lebowski (and still do) and it is also a much more accomplished film.  As the second part of Coen and Cooke’s “Lesbian Trilogy” that kicked off with Drive-Away Dolls , I was expecting something more along the lines of   that   film. I was expecting a fairly tight, extremely funny, confection that I’d be happy to see again (and did!); what I got with the current film is a structurally loose, maybe even sloppy in places, shaggy dog story that amounts to remarkably little. I didn’t dislike the film, but it left me wondering,”why?” There were elements that worked, until they didn’t and plot and character developments that just ran counter to whatever came before, and dare I say, the fridging of a lesbian character that really kind of pissed me off. I’m n...

Right off the bat, I really liked The Roses . A lot. It’s not as dark a comedy as one might be led to believe, but it is farce. This sets it apart from satire by default, and the choices made by Tony McNamara’s script reflect a considerable difference in emphasis from the source material or Danny DeVito’s classic The War of the Roses . I mention this because The Roses is a solid piece of entertainment that works on its own, but seems to suffer in comparison with the earlier works. This points up a problem with adaptations in general. It is often the case that “the book is better than the movie”. There are exceptions, the notable ones that come to my mind are King’s The Shining and Kubrick’s adaptation; both are fine - and one is a genuinely great work of cinema - as they are; American Psycho ; where the film was much livelier, coherent and funny than the novel. Barry Giffords’ Wild at Heart and Lynch’s adaptation are both on equal tier to me. You get the idea. But what happens when ...

  NOTE: SPOILERS ON TOP OF SPOILERS FOR EDDINGTON AND WEAPONS! Don’t read any further unless you don’t care or aren’t going to see the movies or are going to but don’t like surprises (really, you should see these films cold and then circle back with me later.) 2025 has dealt us some compelling films in the horror or horror adjacent genre. Companion , Heart Eyes , Sinners , The Monkey , Eddington , and Weapons come to mind right off the bat. It’s the last two that have been sticking with me the most and not just because they are the most recently watched. Both are jam-packed with ideas, both are told masterfully, intelligently, and both have subtexts that don’t necessarily beat you over the head because the drama unfolding onscreen is so gripping. I find both refreshing because they act as sort of course corrections for much of what has been referred to as “elevated horror”; genre pieces that employ narrative and narrative tropes to interrogate fairly meaty, if not profound themes....

Ahead of   The Phoenician Scheme , I revisited   The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou , Anderson’s first collaboration with Noel Baumbach and his fourth feature overall. I remember being truly impressed with the film on its release and agreed with many that it didn’t quite match the fullness and brio of The Royal Tenenbaums , but I was perplexed by the more negative post mortems the picture received and mystified that it remains considered as a lesser work. Some found the film too glib or too fanciful. For others, it was too arch, too studied.  Or too busy. Or whatever. What struck me this last go round was how full of heart and pathos it is and how deeply felt the emptiness of the title character is portrayed by Bill Murray in what frankly is one of his finest performances.  Unlike Royal Tenenbaum, Zissou is more genuinely taken by the sense of connection he has with Owen Wilson’s Ned, who might be his son that he abandoned decades earlier. He also seems to genuinely ...