Reaction Shots

I have a limited bandwidth for the inanities of most action series. Most of them tend to devolve and if we're honest, weren't really that interesting to begin with. Even the MCU entries - many of which I still enjoy - haven't sustained their initial quality or maintained a consistent level of commitment from moviegoers, it seems. The Mission Impossible series seems to have gotten more adept or accomplished at executing the formula; but can the same be said of the Fast and Furious franchise? Or what do we say about the James Bond films? In the latter case, we have a character rebooted and reinvented that has established a kind of cultural cachet over the course of sixty plus years. The MacQuarrie/Tom Cruise films rather prove my point: these aren't compelling dramas, but they do what they're supposed to: present a regular cast of characters that people find charming or can root for, introduce a McGuffin or two, provide a villain or villain substantially interestin...

When I read of Kenneth Anger's death this past May, my first thought was that another old young Turk has left the building. Along with Godard, it's difficult to call to mind anyone that's left still capable of pushing buttons. Thankfully, Alejandro Jodorowsky is still with us. Anger has a special place in my heart, not the least because I came across his wonderfully tawdry and lurid bullshit-laden tome "Hollywood Babylon" in the seventies. At 18, all you needed to get my attention was to put Jayne Mansfield and her amplitudinous cleavage on the cover of a book. I began reading it and was pretty revolted. A lot of what I read was transparently gossip, hearsay, and the aforementioned dung from a bull's rectum.  In the 80s, I kept stumbling across references to Anger and his work and had pretty much forgotten about his book. I have vague memories of seeing Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome at the Off the Wall Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it didn't...

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s latest, You Hurt My Feelings was the movie I was pining for and didn’t know it. I’ve been watching a wide swath of films lately. Some I’ll write up, some I won’t; but I didn’t realize how starved I was for a human scale, intimate, witty, independent film. Holofcener is a master of understatement and very often just straightforward honesty. Friends with Money, Enough Said , and Can You Ever Forgive Me? are examples of how we struggle to overcome our self-deceptions and relating more authentically to one another. You Hurt My Feelings is another in that vein that pops along with apparently small stakes until we realize that it’s the seemingly small battles we fight that reflect just how deeply we genuinely feel. Beth (a never better Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Don (an equally remarkable Tobias Menzies) have a lovely, committed marriage. She’s a creative writing instructor at The New School, he’s a psychotherapist. She’s finished her first novel and her a...